This 100-year-old insurance company offers a diverse range of insurance and investment products for individuals and businesses across the US.
The organization had an existing Microsoft Azure footprint, but relied primarily on its on-premise infrastructure and data centers for mission critical applications for customers and agents. With an aging Tanzu/PCF platform exposed to potential technology deprecation, increased costs and lengthy contract commits, the company accelerated its plans to migrate and modernize (cloud native) applications to Azure. One key requirement was implementing a FinOps cost-saving strategy for tracking cost monitoring visibility during application migration and deployment across all environments.
Ultimately, the goal was to establish a robust, scalable and optimized infrastructure capable of fueling the organization's ambitious future innovation endeavors.
Fostering future innovation with a FinOps focus
US Insurance company
Legacy platform presents risks, limits growth potential
Proven, prescribed approach for rapid migration
Kin + Carta brought deep application modernization expertise, PCF and Tanzu Application Services (TAS) experience, industry best practices and engineering enablement for a seamless, secure transition without business disruption.
By leveraging our Azure Spring Apps Accelerator, Kin + Carta teams brought a templated approach, including Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) deployable through CI/CD pipelines, that accelerated the organization’s migration and modernization journey, allowing it to realize all the benefits of the public cloud.
Kin + Carta implemented a FinOps strategy, including these enhanced best practices:
- Tagging and categorization of resources - based on purpose, project, environment or department to enable clear identification and accurately track and allocate costs.
- Dynamic and scheduled application elasticity - to spin down resources when not in use, define resource configurations and adjust resources based on workload demands.
- Continuous monitoring and reporting - to track resource utilization and performance, review cost and usage reports and identify optimization opportunities.
We also provided upskilling and created a series of playbooks to enable the company’s internal teams to continue applying best practices.
Modern platform for cost-conscious innovation
Kin + Carta’s accelerated approach saved the organization many months on its Azure migration journey. Approximately 400 application instances were migrated in multiple phases.
The FinOps strategy has contributed to a corporate culture of cost-consciousness and transparency - resulting in financial efficiency, spending control and operational excellence. In one department alone, a 22% monthly cost savings has been achieved.
Consolidating onto Azure has opened the door to many innovation opportunities for the insurance company and positioned it to improve data democratization, run advanced analytics and explore AI technologies.
