British Airways

Moving critical systems to the cloud to improve resilience

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Climate and nature-related risk: Heat, flooding, storms and power disruption affecting data centres and the systems supporting bookings, operations and customer services
Solution pathway: Cloud migration; infrastructure modernisation; reduced dependence on company-operated data centres


Business type: Large international airline 
Sector: Aviation, travel and customer services 
Geography: United Kingdom; global operations 

In practice

British Airways depends on digital systems for bookings, flight planning, airport operations and customer communications. Interruptions to the electricity, cooling or buildings supporting these systems can therefore affect services across the airline. 

In its 2025 interim management report, BA confirmed that its UK data centres had been decommissioned and approximately 95% of the systems previously hosted there had migrated to the cloud. Two co-location data centres remained for additional support. BA connected the change with a more resilient operating model and greater flexibility. 

The potential climate-resilience benefit comes from reducing dependence on individual company-operated sites and accessing specialist infrastructure. For example, AWS’s published data-centre controls describe environmental risk screening, physically separated facilities, backup power and cooling controls. These capabilities require appropriate application design and recovery arrangements; migration alone does not establish how effectively a particular business can withstand climate disruption. 

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Why this example was selected

APEX’s coverage of the 2025 Future Travel Experience World Innovation Summit independently reported BA’s cloud migration and its connection with digital stability and operational decision-making. Combined with BA’s published implementation figures, this provides a documented example of infrastructure modernisation at scale. Its relevance is the potential adaptation benefit of a broader resilience investment; the sources do not establish that the programme was undertaken specifically for climate adaptation. 

Key lesson

Use infrastructure modernisation to examine physical dependencies. Cloud migration can support resilience when businesses assess hosting locations, backup power, cooling, connectivity and recovery arrangements, and design critical applications to use those capabilities. 

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