Calculated risk leads to big rewards in public cloud

A global reinsurance company

Business opportunity

A number of governments worldwide have adopted cautious cloud and networking postures for regulated industries like financial services, making digital innovation a challenge.

So, when one country eased regulations to meet growing demand for digital, its largest reinsurance company was ready with an ambitious public cloud plan.

Success would enable digital transformation at a speed and scale not previously possible in the region, solidifying the reinsurer’s market leadership and opening the door to new services and revenue opportunities.

For the reinsurer’s leadership team, failure was not an option.

Technical challenge

The plan involved a gradual migration of the company’s core and business intelligence systems from the existing on-premise infrastructure to the cloud-based AWS platform. The migration was complex, presenting a host of challenges including the need to:

  • Help ensure compatibility
  • Maintain data integrity
  • Optimize system performance
  • Address security, costs and resource allocation
  • Provide ongoing management support for AWS resources
  • Maintain end-to-end deployment code for application development
  • Support and maintain the code for infrastructure deployment

Crucially, the reinsurance leader also needed to complete the transformation while minimizing disruption to business as usual.

Our solution

Together, the reinsurance company and Kyndryl created and implemented a strategic roadmap for mission-critical systems migration to AWS public cloud using:

  • Jira to efficiently plan and manage tasks
  • GitLab for centralized version control and seamless collaboration
  • Nexus Repository for artifact management
  • SonarQube for code quality and security
  • Spring Boot to refactor applications for cloud compatibility
  • Terraform for automated infrastructure provisioning

Comprehensive testing throughout the migration journey helped identify the root cause of issues early, speeding resolution and minimizing impact on the transformation timeline.

To optimize operation of the new cloud environment long-term, Kyndryl continues to provide:

  • Monitoring and observability for AWS resources and applications
  • 24/7 support and incident response
  • Cost optimization
  • CICD (continuous integration / continuous deployment) pipeline management for application deployment

The power of partnership

The journey to cloud requires powerful solutions for systems management, monitoring and observability. Amazon delivered with:

  • AWS public cloud for low overall cost of ownership, automated deployments, scalability and optimal operational efficiency across a wide range of use cases.
  • Amazon CloudWatch for real-time monitoring of resources and applications to ensure reliability.

What progress looks like

Now post-migration, the reinsurance company’s bold plan is delivering results that peers across the region can aspire to, including:

  • 30% faster deployment times for application  due to automated infrastructure provisioning
  • 25% reduction in post-migration incidents and increased system reliability through AWS CloudWatch monitoring
  • 15% lower operating costs as a result of optimized resource utilization in public cloud

About the customer

One of the world’s largest reinsurance companies based on gross written premiums.

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