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| Industry | Aviation |
| Products | Aeris IoT Watchtower™ |
| Location | Global |
Why Swiss Airlines Chose Aeris IoT Watchtower
Incident diagnosis reduced from days to minutes.
Proactive anomaly detection across ~10,000 devices.
Reduced data consumption via configuration tuning.
Continuous, audit-ready security reporting aligned to device roles.
Swiss International Airlines (Swiss) operates a globally connected fleet of aircraft, along with thousands of missioncritical mobile assets used by pilots, cabin crew, and ground staff. These devices—including Electronic Flight Bags (EFBs), maintenance tablets, and crew devices—are vital for everything from flight planning and passenger manifests to in-flight service and technical operations.
While Swiss had an advanced network architecture with strong foundational security, including robust Mobile Device Management (MDM) controls and a secure VPN overlay, a critical gap remained: end-to-end operational visibility. With approximately 10,000 devices moving across the world, the airline’s IT Operations team could see aggregated SIM usage volumes but lacked the granular details needed to pinpoint the cause of anomalies. This lack of visibility increased operational risk, inflated data costs, and prolonged incident resolution times—directly impacting flight operations, IT workload, and compliance readiness.
The Challenge: The High Cost of Limited Visibility
The absence of real-time, granular data into how, where, and for what purpose data was being used had significant operational consequences. Troubleshooting was time-consuming and purely reactive. This vulnerability was highlighted by a major incident two years prior to adopting a new solution.
A routine software update for a crew app contained an undetected bug, causing the app to re-download entire data sets repeatedly instead of syncing incrementally. Within hours, monthly data allowances were exhausted across thousands of devices. Without connection-level insight, identifying the root cause took several days, impacting operational efficiency and requiring widespread manual intervention.
This event, coupled with a growing desire to answer proactive questions like, “Are our tablets behaving consistently across fleets?” and “Can we proactively detect misconfigurations?” drove Swiss to seek a solution that could provide a new layer of network-level intelligence.
“For me, the biggest benefit is seeing much more data — exactly what is going on with a single SIM card. I can see that SIM A connected to this destination, transferred this amount of data, at this time. That level of detail wasn’t possible before Aeris IoT Watchtower. It’s a game changer for diagnosing and resolving issues quickly.”
Andreas Boesch
Head of Flight Ops Technology & Digitalization Products
The Solution: A Phased Adoption of Aeris IoT Watchtower
In early 2024, Swiss began evaluating Aeris IoT Watchtower through Swisscom, its connectivity partner. The solution was positioned not as a replacement for their existing security stack, but as a network-level augmentation providing an external, independent view of device behavior in the field.
The adoption journey unfolded over 15 months in a textbook example of incremental, operationally-driven security uplift. This phased, group-based approach is now repeatable across any large mobile or IoT estate where devices can be logically segmented by role or function.
Phase 1
Initial Trial & Group-Based Strategy: A 60-day trial focused on operational visibility. The breakthrough came when Swiss structured its environment in the Aeris IoT Watchtower platform to mirror its operational reality, creating three distinct device groups:
- Electronic Flight Bags
- Maintenance tablets
- Crew devices
Phase 2
Structured Adoption & Insight Generation: This grouping strategy was immediately impactful. Swiss observed that each group had a unique data profile and risk surface, and Aeris IoT Watchtower’s per-group network baselines made anomalies instantly meaningful. Key capabilities they leveraged included:
Granular Connection Visibility: For the first time, the team would be able to see destination endpoints (domains/IPs), timestamps, and precise per-SIM data volumes.
Baseline Deviation Detection: The platform modeled expected behavior for each group, which will make it easy to spot outliers, unexpected endpoint calls, and traffic patterns suggesting misconfigurations.
Operational Feedback Loops: Insights from Aeris IoT Watchtower will enable Swiss to proactively reconfigure devices and MDM settings—for example, reducing redundant background data traffic from device operating systems after observing the unnecessary activity.
Phase 3
Operational Integration: The trial quickly maturing into full operational integration. Swiss requested that monthly Risk Assessment Reports (RARs) would be delivered aligned to their device groups, creating a continuous improvement loop. Training is planned to be rolled out to IT Ops teams, embedding Aeris IoT Watchtower into their daily workflows and governance model.
Results: From Reactive Firefighting to Proactive Intelligence
Through the implementation of Aeris IoT Watchtower, Swiss Airlines will be able to eliminate major visibility gaps, thereby fundamentally shifting its operational posture.
- Incident diagnosis reduced from days to minutes.
- Proactive anomaly detection across ~10,000 devices.
- Reduced unnecessary data consumption via configuration tuning.
- Continuous, audit-ready security reporting aligned to device roles.
With Aeris IoT Watchtower, troubleshooting time will be drastically cut. With detailed, per-SIM metrics, the team will be able to diagnose the root cause of data spikes or anomalies in seconds. They believe that if the platform had been in place during the earlier crew app bug incident, the fault would have been identified almost instantly, avoiding widespread data depletion.
The airline also expects to measurably strengthen its security posture. By detecting unexpected endpoint calls, DNS activity, and deviations from normal data consumption, Swiss will prevent operational issues before they escalate, a fact reflect in risk assessment reports that are trending from red/amber toward mostly green.
Finally, the platform provides a compliance-ready audit trail supporting aviation cybersecurity, operational resilience, and regulatory reporting requirements. By providing feedback and feature requests, Swiss has helped influence the Aeris IoT Watchtower roadmap, turning the relationship into a strategic partnership.
Summary
Swiss International Airlines is successfully transforming its approach to mobile asset management by addressing its visibility gaps. By deploying Aeris IoT Watchtower and adopting a fleet-aligned grouping strategy, the airline is turning a critical vulnerability into a source of strength. They are shifting from reactive firefighting to proactive management, making incremental but significant improvements to their security posture. For Swiss, visibility is no longer just a security tool—it is an operational intelligence asset that enhances service continuity across thousands of mission-critical devices.
