How Cover-More launched their insurance platform into a new region and improved worldwide operations using AWS Managed Services

Cover-More, a leading global travel insurance provider that is part of Zurich Insurance Group, recently won the privilege of providing travel insurance services to Booking.com in Europe. To support this new distribution channel, Cover-More had an ambitious goal of launching a secure, flexible and resilient insurance platform in Ireland in three months – without any IT staff onsite.

Cover-More had to not only transform the way they developed and launched their products, but also the way they operated their IT infrastructure. Cover-More decided to leverage AWS Managed Services (AMS) to handle their infrastructure operations. The managed service was set up to enforce Cover-More’s corporate and security infrastructure policies, while enabling them to use their existing CI/CD development practices. This blog will share how Cover-More achieved their goals and the business benefits the new platform provided.

Solution approach

Cover-More’s approach to launching their new platform consisted of the following elements:

Enable: A new AWS Managed Landing Zone (MALZ) was set up. This is an AWS multi-account architecture, pre-configured to facilitate authentication, security, networking, backup, patching, and logging.
Build: AWS worked with Cover-More to transform their existing on-premises insurance suite of products into an elastic and widely available platform.
Operate: AWS Managed Services (AMS) was used to provision, run, and support Cover-More’s infrastructure on AWS. AMS automates common activities such as change requests, monitoring, patch management, security, and backup services.

Figure 1: How AWS Managed Services Works

Business benefits — in Cover-More’s own words

Organizational

This transformation has allowed Cover-More not only to provide a secure and performant platform for Booking.com but will provide the agility necessary to easily add new products and services for customers across Europe in the future.

This new approach to IT operations has helped accelerate our strategy of a global target operating model. This model will assist Cover-More in seamlessly scaling and automating its core applications to multiple environments around the world. Cover-More will significantly benefit from this cornerstone platform well into the future.

Security

As an insurance company, security and compliance is always top of mind. Knowing that this new AMS Managed Landing Zone complied to several different security frameworks (such as PCI, SOC and ISO) gave us peace of mind that our customers’ data was secure.

Staff

This was a very strategic piece of work that moved our EMEA region to the cloud. The blended team applied a rigorous, disciplined and strategic approach with extreme professionalism and flexibility to deliver on the ask in a compressed timeframe.

This has allowed us to redirect over 40% of staff resources away from routine infrastructure tasks. We can now focus our efforts on assisting the broader business in transforming the way we build and deploy applications on AWS.

Our main objective is to create a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) team to build reusable patterns and reference architectures. Using this approach will simplify the consumption of services within AWS, allowing our teams around the world to bring new products to market faster than ever before.

Building a future-proof, agile global business

Having proven our ability to expand and grow globally, Cover-More has set ambitious growth goals that will be achieved through several initiatives tackling global expansion, migration and people upskilling while constantly innovating:

An infrastructure operating model which can now be scaled to all other Cover-More locations around the world.
Refinement and improvement of our cloud centre of excellence (CCOE)
Migration into AWS from our remaining on-premises data centers in Australia, LATM and the USA.
Continual improvement of our applications by segmenting components into different microservices using products such as Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda.
Move towards more AWS managed services such as Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), freeing up even more time for our infrastructure staff.

Conclusion

This case study demonstrates how Cover-More was able to quickly deploy their core insurance platform into in a new geographical region — without the need to build an infrastructure operations team.

For more information on how AWS can help migrate and operate your workload in the cloud, please see the following web pages, blogs, and whitepapers.

About Cover-More

Cover-More is a global insurer, that was founded in Sydney, Australia in 1986. Over the last 35 years, Cover-More has grown to become one of the world’s leading travel insurance, medical assistance and employee assistance providers. Cover-More has more than 2,000 employees in 21 countries across five continents; and is part of Zurich Insurance Group, one of the world’s leading multi-line insurers.

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