Project lays the foundation for one of the world’s oldest general insurers to execute its ambitious digital and cloud strategies
Kyndryl, the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider, and RSA Insurance (RSA), one of the world’s oldest general insurers, announced a collaboration to accelerate RSA’s digital transformation by executing an enormous data migration project which has so far seen 85,000 gigabytes of information moved to the cloud.
Cloud migration is a key component of RSA’s IT infrastructure modernisation drive. RSA turned to Kyndryl to digitally transform its IT infrastructure to make the business more resilient and operationally efficient so it can focus its resources on harnessing data to deliver innovative new offerings for its customers.
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RSA’s mainframe operating system and most of its software systems, support major operations to the tune of around 4.5 million insurance policies. To help modernise its infrastructure and speed innovation, RSA wanted to move its mainframe infrastructure, software, and data to a robust and security-rich cloud architecture. The efficiencies and performance improvements included 30% faster complex automated data processing. This enables RSA to be a more agile, innovative business and deliver new products and services to its customers more quickly.
Kyndryl and RSA worked together to achieve the successful migration. To ensure knowledge and skills transfer between them, the teams ran more than 120 classroom-based virtual sessions and specific one-to-one sessions. RSA’s business testers also executed more than 5,500 test cases to ensure everything was in place for a seamless migration. The fact that it was completed within six months versus an industry average of nine to twelve months for a project of this scale and complexity is a testament to how well the Kyndryl and RSA teams worked collaboratively in extenuating circumstances.
Three mainframe environments were migrated to the IBM Z managed extended cloud infrastructure, or zCloud. The zCloud solution deployed is built to help deliver economies of scale in a securely hosted, high-capacity, high-availability, multi-tenant mainframe environment for primary and backup data centres. This migration is also helping enable RSA to adhere to evolving regulatory requirements from GDPR, which in turn helps them speed their innovation since they can be confident their data is compliant.
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For RSA, the migration to cloud is all about providing agility to support a digital-first enterprise.
“Our goal is to provide a set of technologies that are unparalleled in terms of competitive advantage and ensure that we are outperforming in our chosen markets,”,” commented Akhlas Hafiz, Head of Digital Transformation, Technology Change and Delivery, RSA Insurance. “As an organisation, we are moving away from legacy architecture to meet the demands of scalable growth. In line with our cloud and digital first strategy, this migration gives us the agility to improve delivery predictability. Our move to the cloud is a key milestone on the transformation roadmap. The ability to execute in 6 months showcases the delivery capability we have developed.”
Scalability and security are also key priorities for RSA’s digitally driven growth journey.
“The advantages of these data centres are the high availability and security and resiliency-rich features,” added Shahira Brennan, Managing Partner at Kyndryl. “We’re able to offer the highest levels of security and resiliency to RSA to pass on to their customers. Security and resiliency geared to protect data, protect applications, and to protect the test and production environment.”
The cloud migration represents an important milestone in RSA’s longstanding history in the insurance sector – its first mainframe computer went live in 1969 with punch cards and flat files on an IBM 360/65 with 512k RAM.
As RSA plans to continue modernising its technology infrastructure, Kyndryl will stand side-by-side as one of its trusted advisors.
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