Digitalization has been a key priority for organizations and is now a necessity to stay competitive. Cloud lays the foundation for digitalization and innovation along with delivering an application portfolio that seamlessly manages seasonal workloads and minimizes outages.As a principle, Max Life Insurance has taken a “Cloud First Approach” for all new workloads. Applications that are part of core/legacy have been scoped out based on assessment on the readiness in terms of cost/benefit of migration, complexity & risk of business disruption and technical feasibility.
The Challenge
According to Suhail Ghai, Max Life Insurance’s Chief Digital & Information Officer, due to the limited use of cloud in the past, the company faced challenges such as long hardware refresh cycles of more than 5 years leading to hardware end of life, support challenges & security risks; Lack of agility due to longer lead-time for infrastructure provisioning; Low scalability being on-premises and fixed capacity; Low DR coverage.
The insurance provider has adopted a multi & hybrid cloud strategy, leveraging the best in class capabilities of the cloud native solutions available along with being cost effective and portable to avoid lock-in.
To overcome the challenges, a detailed cloud strategy was developed and approved to be delivered between FY’21- FY’25. For the cloud migration and application modernization, the company partnered with AWS and Azure as its cloud service providers to migrate and modernize the cloud migration roadmap.
Benefits Galore
“The objective is an overall modernization of the end-to-end application portfolio making it more robust, scalable and resilient to enhance the user/customer experience for business teams,” said Ghai.
Ghai chalks out the benefits that Max Life Insurance has been able to realise by investing more in cloud technologies:
Support Business Growth and Scalability– Migration architected to Auto scale for seasonal peaks and increase in business load as well improved user experience and performance observed
Future Proof Technology & Resilience– Approximately 60 servers & 250 TB of data migrated to Auto-scalable and containerized infrastructure improving uptime, APIs deployment modernized on AWS requiring zero business downtime, near-site DR with real-time & 100% capacity availability, near real-time backup with modern stack with near site auto data replication
Reduce Operating Costs– Cost avoidance of close to Rs ₹1 crore with APIs migration to AWS reducing dependence on Legacy appliance, managing hardware refresh every 3 years, newer version of software purchases leading to cost avoidance, 250 TB migrated to lower cost cloud storage
Improve Speed to Deliver– Enabled near real-time Infrastructure provisioning improving Time-to-Market
According to Ghai, Max Life intends to be 45% on the cloud by FY’22 and up to 70-80% by FY’25.
Ghai believes that cloud inherently enhances backup, recovery, and DR posture. “It enables near-site DR with real-time & 100% capacity availability. It also provides near real-time backup with modern stack with near site auto data replication. For all the critical apps we will reduce the maximum data loss to 2 hrs. and restoration time to 24 hrs. by FY’22,” he added.
