BrokerReady Migrates to AWS, Boosting IT Productivity and Accelerating Generative AI Capabilities

BrokerReady provides IT services for insurance brokers across Australia and New Zealand. Its SaaS platform supports client and policy administration systems from multiple vendors while offering enterprise-grade cyber protection, data replication, disaster recovery, and remote workstation management. The company focuses on providing robust IT services that help brokers of all sizes operate more efficiently, regardless of their technology budgets.

As the insurance industry increasingly looks to generative AI for decision-making and risk assessment, BrokerReady sought to integrate the technology into its platform. However, its legacy infrastructure—hosted on premises in a third-party data center—posed significant challenges. The system experienced frequent downtime, and its outdated CPUs struggled with generative AI workloads. Rising costs were another concern, with server licensing fees set to increase following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. “Management costs were also inflated through the double handling of tasks between our IT team and the external engineers at the hosting facility,” explains Josh Barton, chief technology officer at BrokerReady.

To overcome these challenges and increase investment in innovation and generative AI adoption, BrokerReady aimed to modernize its cloud infrastructure for improved agility and simplified management. “Our goal was a high-performance, reliable cloud that provided a cost-effective solution to our VMware licensing issues,” Barton explains. “We wanted a solid foundation for future technologies to stay competitive and deliver better services to our customers.”

After evaluating several cloud providers, BrokerReady selected AWS for its ability to deliver high-performance infrastructure, flexible support for generative AI workloads, and a cost-effective alternative to VMware. The team was especially drawn to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, which offered the scalability and GPU support needed for future-ready workloads. AWS’s strong local presence and robust partner ecosystem also set it apart.

“With some cloud providers, the engagement felt impersonal, but AWS was different,” recalls Barton. “We had face-to-face interactions, which gave us confidence in the AWS team.”

To facilitate the migration, AWS connected BrokerReady with AWS Partner Minfy Technologies (Minfy), a cloud-native solutions integrator. Minfy provided end-to-end support, from initial assessments to deployment, and played a key role in modernizing BrokerReady’s cloud infrastructure. Post-migration, Minfy also assisted with the adoption of cloud-native services and the launch of POC initiatives for generative AI.

To streamline the move to AWS, Minfy leveraged the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP). It conducted a thorough analysis of BrokerReady’s on-premises workloads and used these insights to configure AWS landing zones, ensuring best practices in security and performance. As part of the migration, BrokerReady automated key AWS service configurations, including Amazon EC2 G5 Instances with GPUs and Amazon Elastic Block Store for scalable storage.

With support from Minfy and resources from the MAP, BrokerReady completed its transition to AWS in under four months. During this process, the company migrated its internal Linux-based N-central server to Amazon EC2 with Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL databases. It also moved customer IT environments to AWS, including Windows Active Directory and Windows SQL Server. Recalls Barton, “Due to the extensive testing that Minfy conducted, the transition to AWS was smooth. We moved customers’ workloads over during non-office hours, ensuring they were up and running on AWS by the next morning when everyone came into work.”

Migrating to AWS has helped BrokerReady drive innovation across its platform, integrating generative AI to enhance its services. Customers have already noticed improvements in performance. “One customer, Better Broker Network, reported that the boost in server performance since migrating to AWS has been nothing short of amazing,” says Barton. “Other customers share similar feedback, and we’ve seen a noticeable drop in support call volumes, indicating a smoother operation post-migration. Working with Minfy has been a fantastic experience, and their support has made a significant impact.”

With complete control over its IT environment, BrokerReady has increased IT productivity by 150 percent. “We now have full control and the tools to manage IT resources without relying on external engineers,” Barton explains. “Cloning environments, testing changes, and deploying updates on AWS take minutes or hours instead of days, helping us innovate faster.”

As part of its broader technology strategy, BrokerReady is collaborating with Minfy on a range of generative AI use cases. The company uses Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed generative AI service that offers access to multiple large language models, to develop solutions that help insurance brokers save time on quoting, streamline risk assessments, and enhance customer engagement. “We’re working on POC projects with Minfy to explore the possibilities of generative AI on AWS,” Barton says. “These opportunities weren’t available to us before, and now, new possibilities are opening up.”