Helvetia Insurance, a major insurance provider based in Switzerland, serves customers across Europe. When Helvetia’s data center contract came to an end, the company made a clear decision to transition to the public cloud, specifically AWS. This move aimed to modernize the technology infrastructure that keeps the insurer’s services online and available to customers.
This strategic decision underpinned Helvetia’s cloud-first strategy with the intention to set the baseline for future infrastructure cost savings, while enabling faster time to market and innovation.
Helvetia selected IBM Consulting® for the migration—highlighting the importance of genuine and technical cloud proficiency. The team of cloud-native experts at Nordcloud, an IBM company, were in sync with the requirements of Helvetia.
Lift and shift from on prem to AWS, using Nordcloud’s Migration Factory approach
IBM Consulting employed a proven, proprietary Nordcloud validated Migration Factory approach to facilitate a swift and smooth transition. This engagement model not only sped up the migration process but also helped ensure uniformity and adherence to regulations, while significantly reducing the risk of human error.
Large-scale cloud migrations of similar sized projects often entailed delays in onboarding the managed cloud service provider, but the approach taken by IBM reduced it from weeks to 24 hours per server. The Migration Factory approach has been specifically designed to address bulk migrations involving dozens (and even hundreds) of applications and servers.
The Migration Factory concept was introduced to remove this delay by automating onboarding for lift-and-shift cases like Helvetia. Moreover, thanks to extensive automation and a proven migration process of Nordcloud, it enabled queuing and lining up a larger number of servers, thus reducing the overall time required for the data center exit.
“IBM Nordcloud has integrated successfully with the Helvetia team and other partners, which has enabled the migration from the Helvetia Data-Centers to mainly AWS in such a short time-frame,” said Marc Schmidle, Program Manager Data-Center Right Sourcing, Helvetia.
Enabling modernization in the cloud
The lift-and-shift migration and comprehensive cloud-native managed services provided by IBM and Nordcloud will enable seamless modernizations at Helvetia.
The insurer’s internal departments now utilize IT infrastructure services with higher flexibility and agility. Resource provisioning that once took weeks now occurs instantaneously using standardized services and automated processes. Nordcloud’s cloud migration and managed cloud services also helped Helvetia reduce infrastructure costs through optimization during and after migration.
Helvetia has become a more sustainable organization by eliminating heritage data centers and using public cloud technology powered by renewable energy. It has also become one of the first highly regulated enterprises in Switzerland to undergo a cloud migration. The blueprint provided by IBM and Nordcloud shows other Swiss organizations how they can achieve a similar scaled migration at cost.
“With the successful transformation of our IT operations and the decommissioning of our data centers, our employees now have the resources available to implement future optimizations and improvements in alignment with Helvetia’s IT strategy,” said Eric Jehle, Managed IaaS Service Lead, Helvetia.