Insurance company looking for some cloud cover? Here’s why Hub & Spoke is the new Belt & Braces.
Overview
Since 2001, India’s General Insurance Council, known as GI Council, has served as an essential bridge between the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority and the non-life insurance industry. The organization also plays a key role in raising awareness of industry issues with the Government, facilitating growth and fairness, and protecting the interests of all stakeholders. As you might imagine, GI Council has over 50 member companies each with loads of offices, departments, and processes, all of which need to be brought together on a common platform. Making sure all of these parts are working together to provide seamless service takes some doing.
The Problem
Initially, GI Council was running on Hyper-V virtual machines, private servers managed on-premises. However, faced with a growing number of issues with scaling and spiraling costs, they were looking to avoid running this infrastructure themselves, and migrate everything to Azure, including their production environment. Given the size and nature of the data and the complexity of its structure, migrating to the cloud – although tempting – also represented a challenge in set-up and risks in terms of downtime and data loss.
In our pre-project meetings with the customer, they flagged up several issues that they were facing with running their systems on-premises, namely:
- Calculating storage manually.
- Dealing with Hyper-V’s configuration settings.
- Managing hardware and applications effectively.
- Maintaining the cooling systems and ensuring stable connectivity.
They also found that they were experiencing issues with the organisation’s growth within an environment that was proving to be non-scalable. Any request to change a part of the infrastructure was lengthy, time-consuming, and often meant paying additional licensing costs.
The Solution
After evaluating the state-of-play with GI Council’s systems, processes, and technological infrastructure, Noventiq proposed that the organisation take a ‘hub and spoke’ approach to their cloud solution. This meant building a comprehensive map of the resources in use, with the hub handling the security workload and public endpoint, and the spokes representing the organisation’s private endpoints. This approach brought an end to the constant need to configure new hardware and manage associated contracts. The cloud migration also meant that:
- The organisation was free to scale on the fly.
- Overhead for maintaining the hardware was all but eliminated.
- Integrations can go ahead without presenting a security risk.
The Result
One of the biggest advantages of this migration plan is that removing the Hyper-V servers, has given the customer complete control when managing all their application and SQL database on a single, integrated platform. This ensures that compliance can be easily achieved in the way the company deals and utilizes the data. Removing the organisation’s dependence on legacy solutions and helping them to reconfigure their processes in the cloud environment has freed up the organisation’s ability to secure, scale, and optimise their spend.
Customer takeaway
Pratibha Sarathy, Head - IT Enabled Services, GI Council: “We’ve been working closely with Noventiq for some time, so we were confident in their ability to handle the huge challenge of migrating to cloud throughout the process, we were impressed with their expertise, ingenuity, and the overall level of clarity we received in the explanations of what we should do, how we should do it, and the result it would deliver.”
Noventiq’s takeaway
Kiran Babu, Director - Solutions Sales, Noventiq India: “In a lot of industries the speed at which the tech debt is retired is a measure of the transformation undertaken by the company. The solution we delivered for GI Council is a great example of how operational issues can form as a basis of undertaking transformation and solving real world problems. The results speak for themselves in terms of the time saved in constantly maintaining on-premises infrastructure, and money saved by optimizing cost.”
About Noventiq
Noventiq is the leading global solutions and services provider in digital transformation and cybersecurity for emerging markets, headquartered in London. Noventiq enables, facilitates and accelerates the digital transformation of its customers' businesses, connecting over 75,000 organisations from all industries with hundreds of best-in-class IT vendors, and delivering its own services and solutions.
The company delivered a turnover of approximately US$1.1 billion in the fiscal year of 2021. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange following its successful IPO in October 2021. The company´s c, 3,900 employees, work in almost 60 countries throughout Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa – markets with significant growth potential.
