The challenge
The group ran core policy and claims platforms in data centres where disaster recovery arrangements were complex and costly to test. Confidence in recovery depended on infrequent, labour intensive exercises.
Provisioning environments for testing and change was slow, which delayed the delivery of improvements to products and services. Fixed capacity also made it hard to handle variable workloads efficiently.
Leadership wanted to migrate core platforms to a resilient cloud foundation to strengthen disaster recovery, speed environment provisioning and improve efficiency, while keeping the migration low risk.
Technology landscape
Core policy and claims platforms hosted on premises with complex, costly disaster recovery arrangements.
Slow, manual provisioning of environments that delayed testing and change delivery.
Regulatory expectations around resilience, security and data handling that the target environment had to satisfy.
Our approach
We assessed the platforms and designed a cloud foundation with resilience, security and governance built in, choosing migration paths suited to each workload.
We prioritized the platforms where improved resilience and faster provisioning would deliver the most value, with clear rollback plans for sensitive systems.
We designed recovery arrangements that could be tested more readily, so confidence in resilience would not depend on rare manual exercises.
Implementation
We built the secure cloud foundation with governance and identity controls, then migrated core platforms in planned waves using rehosting or targeted re-platforming as appropriate.
We implemented improved disaster recovery and validated it through testing, alongside functional and performance checks before directing live workloads.
We established monitoring and automated environment provisioning and transferred operational knowledge to internal teams for ongoing running.
Outcomes
- Improved, more easily tested disaster recovery raised confidence in the resilience of core platforms.
- Faster environment provisioning shortened the lead time for testing and delivering improvements to products and services.
- Elastic capacity handled variable workloads more efficiently than the previous fixed infrastructure.
- Governance and security controls in the cloud foundation supported the group regulatory expectations.