Credit: Logicalis
Insurance solutions firm Auto & General has embarked on a cloud transformation journey in Southeast Asia (SEA), tapping on IT services provider Logicalis.
Headquartered in the British Isles, Auto & General’s SEA business was launched in the second half of 2016.
It is parent to Budget Direct Insurance in Singapore – a digital insurance company for car, motorcycle, and travel insurance – as well as car insurance price comparison website and non-life insurance broker EasyCompare in Thailand.
Held back by traditional, on-premise management of services that was not delivering the scalability it desired, the insurance provider sought the migration to the Microsoft Azure platform, targeting faster turnaround time, service optimisation and enhanced cost savings.
“Our existing solution was traditional and this was proving to be a constraint in our efforts to scale up,” shared Koji Yung, Auto & General SEA’s infrastructure and security manager.
“The existing physical hardware and virtualisation environments were not flexible enough to scale-up or scale-down in a short period of time. We needed a solution that could provide us additional resources so as to meet critical delivery timelines.”
Within this context, Logicalis, a Microsoft Azure EMSP (Expert Managed Services Partner), was selected to design and implement a “holistic and comprehensive” cloud adoption roadmap that delivered the benefits of the Azure platform.
Specifically, the managed services partner’s Global Service Operations (GSO) team onboarded Auto & General SEA onto its digital services platform (DSP), with expected outcomes such as faster response time to queries, increased scalability of workloads, secure operations and cost optimisation.
On top of the onboarding and deployment, round-the-clock managed support was also offered with Logicalis guiding the migration initiative with data-driven insights.
“We are excited to be part of Auto & General SEA’s cloud adoption journey by collaborating as a technology partner with strong experience and deep insights for adopting cloud technology in a FinTech environment,” stated Paras Chadha, senior business director of the Microsoft Business in Asia at Logicalis.
Underscoring Logicalis’ Production Ready Cloud Platform (PRCP) migration framework for Azure as a “zero-risk foundation for cloud”, he believed that the insurance company has gained a “significant” competitive advantage and simplified mode of operations with the project.
“We are committed in supporting Auto & General in realising their mission to reach full potential of cloud by optimising performance and ROI with Azure Managed Services that deliver scalability, cost efficiencies and a blueprint for ongoing innovation,” added Chadha.
Meanwhile, Yung evaluated that the initiative met the company’s goals of building a “resilient and secure” cloud platform that complied with the Monetary Authority of Singapore and local Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA), as well as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).
“The solution presented by Logicalis was robust and ensured flexibility, agility and greater portability. While current workloads were transitioned to the cloud with ease, they deployed reusable frameworks, that can be used in future as well,” he concluded.
