Helvetia Develops Cloud Strategy with Accenture to Migrate Key Elements of Application Landscape to AWS

AWS Partner Accenture helped Swiss-based Helvetia Insurance develop a cloud migration strategy for part of its applications’ landscape to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Helvetia provides all forms of insurance in Europe, and specialized insurance and reinsurance services worldwide. With 72 percent of its applications now migrated to the cloud, it is on target to close its data centers by the end of 2023. Using AWS services including Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS, the company has cut its carbon emissions by 70 percent and is able to instantly spin up new testing environments, allowing it to focus on innovation.

Helvetia Insurance, based in Switzerland and founded in 1858 has grown into a leading insurance group with over 12,000 employees, and more than 7 million customers. It is the leading all-lines insurer in Switzerland and also operates in European markets that comprise Germany, Italy, Austria, and Spain, where the company has established a consistent record of generating above-average growth. Helvetia’s Specialty Markets market area gives it a presence in France and selected global regions, and it offers tailored insurance and reinsurance cover worldwide.

Previously, the company was running its IT systems across several data centers and wanted to benefit from a modern cloud infrastructure to support its digital transformation. Helvetia turned to AWS Partner Accenture to help it develop a cloud strategy and provide insights into different public cloud providers, for example for key AWS services that would meet its needs.

In 2018, Accenture began helping the company to develop a cloud strategy, based on Helvetia’s own objectives for the cloud migration. These included: refocusing resources on value-add activities, introducing an approach of continuous improvement, and delivering business innovation at a faster pace.

Helvetia also wanted to offer a modern technology environment to help retain staff and attract new talent. “We needed a partner with a proven track record,” says Raphael Graber, lead for cloud solutions at Helvetia. “Accenture brought a lot of expertise, which really strengthened our cloud strategy.”

Because Helvetia had no dedicated cloud team, Accenture recommended that the insurer set up a cloud center of excellence to support its migration. It then worked with the company to find the best solutions to meet its needs and objectives. Accenture evaluated several cloud providers and determined that AWS provided the best fit for key elements of Helvetia’s application landscape. “We had a lot of support from Accenture and AWS from the start,” says Graber. “AWS made clear suggestions on how to save money too, which was very powerful for us.”

Accenture conducted an application assessment across Helvetia’s entire IT estate to determine which applications should be moved first. Accenture also supported Helvetia with its initial application migrations and modernizations, using a development environment built on AWS. The first workload to migrate was a customer-facing web application, to test the efficacy of the cloud strategy.

Helvetia then migrated its first two significantly sized applications, its customer portal and website, to AWS. For these applications, the cloud platform is built on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which allows it to set up, operate, and scale relational databases in the cloud.

As a next step, Helvetia migrated its internal knowledge management system to AWS, linking this to Amazon Aurora, which provides high performance and availability at scale—saving 60 percent on costs in the first year for this application. “The initial migrations gave us a lot of experience in how to optimize workloads in the cloud,” says Graber. “By making our applications cloud-native, we saw a real opportunity to save money.”

Because of the scalability of AWS services, the company has been able to optimize costs and reduce its carbon emissions, by scaling infrastructure up and down for higher and lower periods of demand. Using AWS, Helvetia reduced its carbon impact by 70 percent in less than 3 years from 2020. It achieved this by reducing its use of server instances outside of business hours—at nighttime and on weekends. It is also able to scale up its infrastructure to support daily, weekly, and monthly demands for compute capacity.

To support the security of its infrastructure and ensure that all system changes are logged, the company uses AWS CloudTrail to track user activity and API usage for internal IT systems. To detect any anomalies and ensure its entire infrastructure is protected, Helvetia uses Amazon GuardDuty, which protects AWS accounts with intelligent threat detection. In addition, Helvetia uses Amazon Inspector, to deliver automated and continual vulnerability management at scale.

Developing new services is now much easier for Helvetia’s development teams. They can set up new testing environments simply and quickly using infrastructure as code (IaC), instead of the several weeks it previously took to provision the necessary compute resources using its previous on-premises’ IT setup.

Helvetia teams also use AWS serverless services—including AWS Lambda and Amazon EventBridge—to automate processes, and Amazon Textract to identify and classify unstructured document data. “With development much easier and with AWS services automating time-consuming processes, the IT team can focus much more on innovation and support business growth,” says Graber.

Using the cloud strategy developed with Accenture, Helvetia has migrated and modernized 72 percent of its applications and is on target to phase out its data centers by the end of 2023. “Helvetia has made fast gains since starting its cloud move,” says Tobias Abt, lead cloud and infrastructure Switzerland at Accenture. “By using a clear cloud strategy, it’s now on target to complete the move within the 5-year timeframe it set.”

With its migration complete, Helvetia plans to continue to optimize its infrastructure and extend the use of services that support artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

Helvetia’s IT team is proud that the whole organization is benefiting from the cloud. “We are almost complete with the first part of our cloud journey,” says Graber. “We now have a solid foundation to build on that supports the long-term aims of the business.”