CloudBound: Azure-Powered Transformation Journey

The client

Industry  -  A leading expert in the insurance market and part of one of the largest and most successful insurance groups in the world.

Location - Headquartered in London, England, United Kingdom

Turnover - $141.3M (Approx.)

Branches - USA and UK

No. of Employees - 500+

The client is a leading expert in understanding and connecting US cover holders and brokers to flexible and innovative insurance solutions. As a wholly owned subsidiary of Munich Re, the client has access to the expertise, products, and risk appetite of one of the largest and most successful insurance groups in the world.

Challenges

• Challenges with scalability, advancement, and innovation, as existing applications are built on legacy technologies and are designed based on on-prem system capabilities
• Finops measures in lower environments impact the applications’ performance
• Creation of automation scripts and parallel provisioning of the environments to meet migration timelines was a challenge as it required additional efforts
• Current workforce lacked cloud technologies skills and competency to design and implement the solution

LTM solution

• Performed detailed cloud assessment of existing on-prem environment in the discovery phase
• Designed the complete cloud architecture, including all resources sizes and flow
• Identified and documented the testing use cases, outlining the behavior of the applications
• Re-hosted Bridge applications and SQL database to Azure cloud
• Leveraged existing Azure services such as AD server, file server, firewall, load balancer, VPN gateway, and SEIM on cloud environment
• Implemented cost management and optimization measures

Key benefits

• Improvised application in terms of high availability, security, scalability, and aligned it with the parent organizations’ guidelines and practices
• Role-based access groups and permissions for better user management and permission
• E2E automation in the cloud environment enabled the application and support teams to set up and decommission the environment on a need-basis within hours
• Reduction in overall cost by enabling FinOps best practices and measures

Engagement outcome

• 25% reduction in operational and infrastructure setup costs
• Near 0% business impact during migration
• Successfully migrated applications to Azure cloud leveraging Rehost and Replat form approach

Technology stack

Terraform, Ansible, Microsoft Azure Cloud native services: Azure Data Factory, Azure App Service, Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Key vault, Azure Storage, Azure Monitor, and Azure LogAnalytics Workspace.