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Project is first in the financial sector to transition entire workloads on the backbone system and information system to public cloud

SEOUL, March 22, 2023 — Kyndryl, the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider, announced that it has completed a 20-month complex project for Korean Re, one of the world's top-10 reinsurance companies. Kyndryl transitioned the company’s backbone system and information system workloads to a public cloud for the first time in the Korean financial sector.

Korean Re's 'Core Business System Conversion to Cloud (of entire infrastructure system and information system workloads and key solutions)' project, which attracted the attention of the Korean financial sector and IT industry, was a challenging project. It required a high level of understanding of the financial sector's business processes, on-premises environment, competence in hybrid cloud environments, and experience in multi-cloud operations, and spanned 20 months from deployment to stabilization. Through a successful cloud migration, Korean Re has increased the efficiency of its IT operations, improved business processing performance, and secured agile business responsiveness based on digital capabilities.

Cloud adoption is gaining interest in the financial sector. According to Korea's Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), out of 110 domestic financial companies, the number of companies that have adopted cloud has grown steeply from 23 in 2017 to 42 in 2020. With the government's recent move to ease cloud regulations, the introduction of cloud in the financial sector is expected to accelerate further.

Cloud migration of financial data centers demands significant experience in open source solutions to be replaced on the cloud, as well as a deep understanding of the complex IT environment in the financial sector. Korean Re’s successful transition to the cloud is expected to be a breakthrough for various financial institutions, including the primary financial sector, in promoting digital innovation through cloud adoption.

Korean Re had been operating its core business system on its own data center, with some unit-businesses on multiple hyperscalers. It migrated its core business system to a hybrid multi-cloud in order to operate in an integrated environment.

During the migration process, Korean Re also moved its backbone system and information system databases from the on-premise environment to open-source databases such as AWS Aurora PostgreSQL and AWS Redshift. The cloud migration improved performance, interoperability, and compatibility by updating the UI of infrastructure applications to HTML5-based and changing the application framework to the latest lightweight framework.

A DevOps system was also established to automate and optimize application development and deployment in Atlassian and GitLab environments. This laid the foundation for deployment, monitoring, and rapid improvement as needed. Furthermore, a non-disruptive disaster recovery system was established by leveraging AWS multi-zone configuration and utilizing backup and recovery functions. This provided stable and rapid data resiliency to meet the high-level demands of the financial business.

JuBock Ryu, managing director of Kyndryl Korea said, “I am delighted that we have successfully completed a very large project to transform the entire workloads on the backbone system and information system, as well as key solutions to the cloud for the first time in the financial sector in Korea” and added, “Korean Re’s determination and Kyndryl’s collaboration model will be an important example for accelerating digital innovation in the financial sector in Korea in the future.”

About Kyndryl
Kyndryl (NYSE: KD) is the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider serving thousands of enterprise customers in more than 60 countries. The Company designs, builds, manages and modernizes the complex, mission-critical information systems that the world depends on every day. For more information, visit www.kyndryl.com.

Kyndryl Press Contact
press@kyndryl.com