Let’s talk about data security and protection: a tale of how a Customer was able to leverage the OVHcloud architecture to become a market leader.
Migration to the cloud offers countless advantages and seems to be an inevitable step in the development of any modern enterprise. Those advantages become clearly visible in most sectors, especially finance and insurance, where applied solutions must both protect the customer data and offer cost-effective ways of handling big chunks of information.
Many customers are anxious to know where their data is going. How can they be sure the data is safe? What happens if the data disappears? Or gets stolen?
Sensitive data needs secure infrastructure, but time-effective solutions are also key to ensure success in any competition-dense industry.
Cloud migration requires some specific skills and experience that aren’t always available in-house. That’s what OVHcloud Partners can help you with.
Let’s have a look how two OVHcloud partners, Crowtech and Zapaśnik IT joined forces to create an innovative and secure solution for an insurance company by leveraging OVHCloud BareMetal Cloud. They created a distributed virtualization solution across PL/DE data centers with their own managed Kubernetes.
By implementing this solution, the customer gewas able to become a leader of innovation on the market and take over larger contracts, that until now where unreachable.
A customer looking to migrate to the Cloud
The Customer, Promesa Plus, is a broker offering the vehicles insurance policies from all top players on the market. The company’s target market are car dealers, as well as corporate customers.
Since having introduced their first solution in 2004, Promesa Plus has been the most innovative company on the market, moving ahead of its competitors. However after several years, the system they built needed an upgrade.
The broker was looking for a solution to address numerous challenges, such as fast-evolving insurance rates, complexity and variety of products, as well as numerous algorithms to calculate the final rates.
Managing an insurance enterprise is not an easy job, given that data management and security are essential. The initial on-premise infrastructure was not sufficient and they were not able to implement the industry regulations, security best practices and system development needs.
Because of these limitations, the business was underperforming – updating the database, adding a new customer/partner or using the e-commerce system were taking too much time, leading customers to leave their baskets abandoned.
Unfortunately, any modernization of the system was also restricted, as the development cycle was not automated. For example, it could only populate new extensions to system in a “traditional” way. Any new code required a reboot of the system. This was extremely time-consuming and ended up leaving room in the marketplace for the competition.
Consequently, Promesa Plus could not easily process both growing number of transactions and integration of new customers. As a result, both employees and customers had a negative experience and this in turn has put the growth of the company in jeopardy.
A strategic decision was made to direct the upcoming transformation towards efficiency, scalability, security and availability of the system. To support the company in this challenging task, Promesa Plus invited two partners Crowtech & Zapaśnik IT to join them on this journey. Having researched many potential solutions thoroughly, Promesa Plus chose to pursue the Cloud’s advantages.
They decided to migrate the whole environment, including the development, quality and production with CI/CD pipeline, built new e-commerce and put in place a disaster-recovery plan.
The solution
The solution they came up with was a microservices-oriented architecture built on the OVHcloud BareMetal Cloud using Kubernetes orchestration turned out to be the best solution for the challenges and specificity of the agency and its frequently-evolving data. Data collocation between two Data Centres in Warsaw and Frankfurt offer high availability and improve the efficiency of the platform.
The usage of the microservices architecture allows for a relatively easy extension of computing power and appropriate management of replications, as well as helps to achieve the expected efficiency, depending on the complexity of the calculation of the product. Depending on the business needs and complexity of the insurance products, the expected performance is achieved by managing the number of replicas in the Kubernetes cluster.
The distributed architecture required a new monitoring tool – Observability. The solution providers (Crowtech & Zapasnik IT) decided to implement the tool based on ElasticStack (Elasticsearch, APM, Filebeat, Metricbeat). It offered an almost real-time access to log, trace logs and metrics that were ensured by fast hard discs and large bandwidth. The CI/DF pipeline has been introduced, developers from Crowtech published the changes and since then the system has been taking care of the distribution in the Kubernetes cluster.
Below is a high level Architecture
The benefits for the customer
The immediate benefit was a scalable andinnovative platform called PromesaOnline. The solution leveraged OVHcloud infrastructure and combined with Kubernetes orchestration, ensured both horizontal and vertical scalability.
The new process now fully-automated allows access to data for both the employees and Partners securely but efficiently . This system is available online for all branches and all Partners and allows for generation of customized reports.
The integration with Partners ERPs is now available, speeding the processes up immensely and generating considerable cost savings. Finally, automation allows for elimination of potential human errors.
It also generates new opportunities and integrates new larger customers – for instance, two large companies with urgent needs to renew insurance policies for their 20 000 vehicles. Integration of a new customer was reduced from 1 hour of manual data entry to zero. To give you an idea: with the old system in order to integrate 2 new customers, Promesa Plus would have had to employ 12 additional people for a year! Now it takes just the time to link both CRMs together.
The new solution also improved the employees engagement, liberating time for more creative tasks and leaving place for innovation.
Based on the experience of the solution providers (Crowtech & Zapasnik IT), they planned and implemented an enhanced disaster-recovery plan.
All data are cross-site replicated and stored in datacenters located in Europe.
With this new system, the company is now expanding its automated offering to other segments, moving back to the position of the innovation leader in the insurance market sector in Poland.
Why we chose OVHCloud?
1. Data Sovereignty and Security : OVHcloud ensures that the customer’s data is protected against possible interference, ISO 27001 certified DCs and compliant with European regulations thereby guaranteeing data sovereignty.
2. Predictable pricing : OVHcloud provides cloud services with simple billing and no hidden costs. No Ingress-egress Fees for customers wanting to move data around.
3. Best Price / Performance : Ovhcloud provides the best price/ performance ratio on the market and provide the platform to accelerate deployment of resource intensive applications and customer satisfaction.
Zapaśnik IT – Managed IT Services & IT Consulting, OVHCloud Advanced Partner
The Zapaśnik IT provides services to clients using Windows & Linux systems. In need of security assessment, security review, migration or new server setup? Call us, tell us what you need and we will surely find a suitable solution for you!
Crowtech – Software development and Cloud services
Crowtech is formed of goal-oriented professionals, who, thanks to their collective experience and skills, providing high-quality solutions and IT services for financial market.
Filip Zapaśnik