Zen Helps Westfield Health Migrate to Boost Reliability and Security Using AWS

Westfield Health is an international health and wellbeing provider. Founded in the UK in 1919, it provides health and wellbeing solutions to individuals and businesses. It has over 500,000 policyholders, employs over 500 employees, and generates around £70 million in annual revenues.

Westfield’s in-house IT team was managing and maintaining its insurance platform, which had over time become less reliable and required more maintenance and upkeep. “Our small team of engineers was constantly firefighting issues and would often have to be fixing issues at the data centers at weekends and in the middle of the night,” says Fran Gledhill, head of programmes and IT operations at Westfield Health. “It was frustrating because it also affected their availability during regular working hours.”

Insurance is a highly regulated industry and Westfield understood it needed to transform its infrastructure to maintain long-term compliance with regulations such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and key standards such as ISO 27001 and ISO 9001. “We were never at risk of regulatory breach but we recognized that risks would emerge if we didn’t take action,” says Julian Chance, director of operations and transformation at Westfield Health. “We had to either invest in more hardware or do something completely different.”

After a tender process, Westfield Health engaged with UK-based AWS Partner Zen to provide expert guidance. The companies created a plan to migrate the majority of Westfield’s systems to AWS and decommission Westfield’s data centers.

“It was a massive project, so we divided it into eight phases, starting with trials for different workloads,” says Gledhill. “We needed to decide what needed rehosting, what needed to be rearchitected, and what could be binned.”

Zen worked closely with Westfield’s technical team to design the new AWS infrastructure and provide training to help the migration run as smoothly as possible. “Our IT team and Zen talk to each other all the time—they share documents and I can monitor the progress without having to chase anyone,” says Gledhill. “Our in-house expertise has increased massively over the past year, and much of that is due to working alongside Zen.”

Dividing the project into eight phases made it easy to communicate progress with Westfield’s senior management team. “It’s difficult explaining to the business teams what is happening in a language they understand,” says Gledhill. “I can tell them the admin document repo has been migrated, but they have no idea what that means, so instead I can just say we have completed phase four and have moved on to phase five.”

The project kicked off in January 2023 with Zen using the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), which provides tools to reduce costs while automating and accelerating the migration. Zen migrated Westfield’s databases and applications to AWS, largely using services such as AWS Application Migration Service and AWS DataSync to accelerate the process.

In addition, the adoption of services such as AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager, AWS Backup, and Amazon CloudWatch enabled Westfield to retire legacy systems and reduce operational overhead, while improving their capabilities. AWS Lambda is also being used to automate several key activities, improving reliability and performance in a cost-effective way.

Westfield Health’s migration to a cloud infrastructure is now almost complete and the company is already starting to see some tangible benefits. In addition to gaining improved reliability, Westfield can now understand its precise costs even for small test projects. “Using AWS, our whole system is more stable and there are no more hidden costs—we only pay for what we use,” says Gledhill. “Previously, we had a massive data center bill and just accepted it, but now we will have complete transparency and know exactly what every element of every project costs us.”

Gledhill says the scalability and availability of Westfield’s infrastructure has already helped the software development team be more productive and efficient. The company’s ability to respond quickly to business demand has recently seen the launch of a new application to support its customers, with the initial supporting cloud infrastructure created over a few days.

Westfield’s new cloud infrastructure is the foundation for its business and the company plans to continue working with Zen to grow the business. “We are starting to see some benefits, but we have plenty more to do,” says Chance. “Zen has proven it’s not here to just sell us stuff and get out—we have a fruitful relationship that is going to continue for some time.”