Business opportunity
As part of its digital transformation strategy, a multinational health and life insurance and wealth management company wanted to harness the benefits of the public cloud.
Migrating key systems from an on-premises data center to the Microsoft Azure cloud would provide greater agility and scalability while also reducing IT operational costs. The combination of lower costs and enhanced capabilities would enable the company to invest in building innovative digital services for its customers.
Technical challenge
The key technical challenge was to include AIX and IBM i production workloads in the cloud migration, as leaving them on-prem would limit the overall cost and agility benefits. These workloads run only on the IBM Power architecture and cannot be moved to the x86 architecture which is a standard feature of all hyperscaler public clouds.
The applications running on AIX and IBM i include the company’s most important insurance policy management systems. It was therefore vital to find a low-risk, proven path to Azure that would enable migration with little to no business disruption.
Our solution
The company selected Kyndryl Skytap on Azure to run its IBM Power workloads on the Azure cloud. The Skytap on Azure solution provided a proven, high-speed, low-risk migration path without the cost and disruption of having to rewrite, refactor or replatform the Power applications.
Working closely with the appointed Managed Service Partner and Azure Product Engineering, the insurance and wealth management company ran a detailed proof-of-concept (POC) to validate the Skytap solution. Following this successful POC, the company formalized its plans to complete the broader migration.
The power of partnership
Skytap drew on its partnership with Microsoft to provide continuous support and testing throughout the implementation of the solution, ensuring a smooth transition for the insurance and wealth management company.
