Cloud Ascend How a US-based Insurance Leader Streamlined Operations and Reduced Costs

About the client 

TThe client is a leading provider of insurance and financial services in the U.S., specializing in property and casualty coverage for individuals and businesses. With a diverse portfolio that includes home, auto, and liability insurance, the company operates across domestic and international markets. Headquartered in New York City, the client is known for its innovative approach to insurance and consistently ranks among the Fortune 500. However, they faced rising datacenter costs and maintenance overheads related to on-premises workloads, which hindered their ability to scale efficiently and optimize operations.

Challenges

• High licensing fees, data center costs, and maintenance overheads tied to PCF workloads on-premises created barriers to cost-effective scalability
• Customer-facing applications experienced frequent downtimes and low availability, affecting service reliability.
• The absence of an in-built CI/CD ecosystem and lack of automated monitoring tools hindered the client’s ability to quickly roll out new features and improve time-to-market.

Solution highlights     

• Migrated the business layer applications from PCF to AWS EKS, achieving high availability, resilience, and scalability while eliminating costly PCF licensing fees.
• Optimized application performance by refactoring code for enhanced client-side state management.
• Shifted frontend applications to AWS EKS and S3, with CloudFront ensuring faster, more efficient content delivery.
• Executed a comprehensive data migration process, moving files from NAS to S3 and transitioning on-premises databases, such as SQL Server and Oracle, to AWS Aurora using AWS SCT and DMS.
• Implemented a robust CI/CD pipeline utilizing Jenkins, ArgoCD, and Helm charts to streamline deployment and ensure faster delivery of new features.

This approach ensured reduced costs, greater scalability, and a seamless integration of new technologies, with AWS Data Migration playing a critical role in transforming the client's infrastructure.

Business outcomes

• Reduced licensing and hosting costs by 30%, driving significant savings across the organization.
• Lowered operational expenses by 51%, through efficient cloud migration and modernization. 
• Increased application performance by 70%, ensuring smoother operations and faster response times.
• Reduced manual intervention by 20%, with automated CI/CD pipelines.
• Implemented zero-touch, automated deployments using DevOps, slashing unplanned downtime by 94%.

Modernizing legacy systems on AWS, utilizing AWS MAP, resulted in:

•  67% lower transformation costs and 50% faster policy quoting by enhancing underwriting processes.
• Improved policyholder experience with low-latency interfaces for faster, more seamless service.

The Application Modernization Proof of Concept accelerated decision-making, enabling: The shift to new rating models, optimizing revenue generation for business insurance products.

Leveraging Gen AI powered by Amazon Bedrock led to:

• Increased innovation velocity, providing near real-time analytics to underwriters and actuaries, boosting business insurance revenue by 6%.
• Enhanced policyholder satisfaction by automating the conversion of legacy systems, enabling faster access to loss information through modern interfaces

Conclusion

The AWS migration and modernization executed by LTM allowed the client to significantly reduce operational and licensing costs while improving overall system performance. By modernizing their legacy applications and implementing a robust CI/CD pipeline, the client not only streamlined their processes but also enhanced user experience with faster, more reliable services. These advancements led to lower downtime, increased scalability, and improved policyholder satisfaction, positioning the client for sustained growth and innovation in a competitive insurance market.