Sara Assicurazioni Simplifies Cloud Adoption with a Responsive Application Architecture from TIBCO and AWS

Founded in 1946 and headquartered in Rome, Sara Assicurazioni is one of Italy’s major insurance carriers. Three years ago, the insurer began a major digital transformation project. It decided to move from an on-premises data center and legacy software to a cloud platform, so it could quickly offer mobility solutions with the look and feel of familiar apps like Amazon and Facebook. Using AWS for its cloud infrastructure and TIBCO for its development ecosystem, the insurer has developed innovative insurance products and applications, shortened development time dramatically, and reduced infrastructure costs by 50 percent.

Sara Assicurazioni is on a mission to become an agile, digital, and competitive IT-driven company by transforming its IT platform from a cost center to a business driver. However, in 2017, an on-premises data center, mainframe, and legacy applications stood in the way of these ambitious goals. Application development was slow, scalability was limited, new releases required hours of downtime, data alignment lagged, mobility was not supported, service integration was complex, and cybersecurity was limited. To address these challenges, Sara Assicurazioni decided to move to the cloud so it could be more agile, reduce costs, and create innovative applications and products needed to remain dominant in its market.

“The idea was not about efficiency—although that was a benefit—but instead to serve the business better with new product development, improved scalability, resilience, and increased security,” said Luigi Vassallo, Director of IT and Digital Innovation at Sara Assicurazioni.

After a thorough vendor search and evaluation process, Sara Assicurazioni chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions for its cloud infrastructure and TIBCO as the main component of the application development ecosystem on AWS. By the end of 2018, Sara Assicurazioni had moved more than 60 business applications, including its insurance claims processing systems, to AWS. It relies on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon Aurora for all mission-critical databases, along with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

This transformation has enabled Sara Assicurazioni to dispense with batch processing that aligned data every 24 hours and move to a more real-time environment, where customer data is updated instantly. Service interruptions of 2-3 hours are now a thing of the past. System updates can take place without any downtime.

With its cloud infrastructure in place, Sara Assicurazioni had the platform and technology it needed to begin developing modern apps using architecture innovations like microservices and APIs with a mobile-first mindset. The application development ecosystem relies on TIBCO’s broad range of capabilities, from integration and messaging to event stream processing and in-memory data-grid.

“We were impressed with TIBCO’s flexibility in terms of the opportunity to develop new and to build applications based on microservices and integration with external partners,” said Luigi Vassallo, Director of IT and Digital Innovation at Sara Assicurazioni.

With its new integration platform, the company delivers new products to market in weeks instead of months. In addition, Sara Assicurazioni often delivers two or more new application releases per week. As a result, all its employees have mobile access to all applications.

Vassallo says that the secret to the company’s successful migration and application development is not just technology. Buy-in was critical. The first step was getting the CEO on board. The second step was involving stakeholders early in the process. “Stakeholders need to share the vision. You have to emphasize that the transition period will be difficult, but afterwards they will have something better. And this is why agents have been part of the project since the beginning,” explained Vasallo.