CLIENT OVERVIEW
The company is a top-five North American insurer specializing in auto insurance. It provides coverage for more than 24 million motor vehicles to more than 15 million policyholders across all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
To improve the user experience for customers and counselors, the topfive North American insurer implemented a single sign-on application so policyholders could more easily navigate and interact with their policies. This was enabled by tokens provided by an SSO application built on ForgeRock’s Identity Platform.
However, the benefits of this solution were short lived. The ageing onpremises application was plagued by an inability to readily integrate new features and services, creating a host of problems, including poor security, lackluster performance, and frequent downtimes, ironically degrading the user experience it was designed to improve.
SOLUTION OFFERED
Recognizing the escalating issues, the insurer resolved to modernize its data platform in the cloud, aiming to rectify the current problems while paving the way for a more efficient, userfriendly solution for customers, counselors, and IT.
The insurer partnered with ValueMomentum’s DataLeverage team to move the application from two on-premises data servers in a hardened network zone to Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Platform.
ValueMomentum migrated the application to Azure Cloud as a cloud service, developed a new SSO application on ForgeRock’s Identity Platform to authenticate users with ADFS/Azure AD, and rewrote the ForgeRock authentication agents in an ASP.NET Core framework, deploying as Linux containers through Azure Kubernetes Services.
The API applications were also rewritten with the updated ASP.NET Core framework to leverage cloud-native features and cross-platform capabilities.
The DataLeverage team then embedded admin features in a new counselor application and authenticated them with the new counselor SSO, while removing app fabric caches in favor of Azure services — Azure Redis Caches for application caches, Azure Cosmos DB for audit logs, and Azure Service Bus for business metrics. Azure Pipelines handled builds and deployments, while the API and UI application code bases were consolidated into a single Azure DevOps git repository.
ValueMomentum’s deep well of insurance experience and long track record of completing similar migrations drove the success of this project, as the DataLeverage team had a proven set of technologies and processes they used to quickly perform the migration without disrupting the insurer’s business operations. Specifically, the team greatly reduced QA (Quality Assurance) turnaround time by using Azure DevOps to drive continuous deployments to dev and integration environments, and created a DR (Disaster Recovery) environment with automated switchover capabilities that was provisioned to a different Azure region, so the switchovers never took longer than five minutes.
[The Insurer] achieved faster time-to-market by centralizing automated deployments, offering much quicker and seamless releases compared to supporting multiple separate components.
VALUE DELIVERED
In addition to vastly improving the user experience for customers and counselors, by partnering with ValueMomentum and transitioning to ASP.NET Core on Azure Cloud Services, the insurer reaped substantial business rewards. They achieved faster time-to-market by centralizing automated deployments, offering much quicker and seamless releases compared to supporting multiple separate components.
Beyond the typical cloud advantages like cost-efficiency and flexibility, they improved performance metrics including response times and better memory and CPU usage. The shift also fortified their security through authentication gateways, reducing data breach risks. Developer productivity also increased, thanks to smoother cross-application work, speeding up operations.
Ultimately, this cloud migration fostered agility, data-driven decision making, and operational efficiency, driving the insurer’s success in a competitive landscape.
