Sara Assicurazioni Uses AWS to Mitigate Risk and Launch New Applications

Italian insurance provider Sara Assicurazioni ran its critical internal business applications, including its claims processing system, on-premises for years. However, as the company grew, it needed to scale quickly to meet the demand for more digital services. “It took weeks for our development team to procure hardware, provision resources, and add capacity to support new application development,” says Luigi Vassallo, director of IT and digital innovation for Sara Assicurazioni. “We needed our developers to focus on adding value to the business, not managing infrastructure.”

The company also needed to ensure high availability for its business-critical applications, including properties and casualties, claims, life and home insurance, and business intelligence applications. “It is essential that we have zero service disruptions,” says Vassallo. Additionally, because the company is subject to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) data privacy requirements and other regulations, it needed to support compliance for its workloads.

“It took weeks for our development team to procure hardware, provision resources, and add capacity to support new application development. We needed our developers to focus on adding value to the business, not managing infrastructure.”

- Luigi Vassallo, Director of IT and Digital Innovation, Sara Assicurazioni

  • About Sara Assicurazioni

  • Sara Assicurazioni is a leading Italian insurance company offering automobile, home, health, protection, accident, savings, investment, security, and property insurance products. Founded in 1946 as insurance company, Risks Automotive, Sara Assicurazioni is the official insurer of the Automobile Club d’Italia. As well as serving the Motor TPL class, the company operates in the life and fund management sector. Based in Rome, Italy, Sara Assicurazioni has more than 600 employees.

  • Benefits
    • Launches new applications in minutes instead of days
    • Boosts the number of software releases from one per month to more than two per week
    • Ensures compliance with stringent industry regulations
    • Increases innovation by releasing new anti-fraud service
  • AWS Services Used

Migrating 60 Critical Applications to the AWS Cloud

Sara Assicurazioni migrated more than 60 business applications, including its Oracle-based insurance claims processing systems, to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The migration was seamless and completed in weeks. The company now runs its application environment on AWS and relies on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle and Amazon Aurora for all mission-critical databases.

The organization ensures high availability for all systems by taking advantage of multiple AWS regions across Europe.

Launching Application Environments in Minutes, Not Days

Running on AWS, Sara Assicurazioni can provision compute resources faster. “Our time-to-market is much faster on AWS. If our marketing team wants to launch a new digital campaign, we can provision a completely new environment in minutes. Previously, it would have taken several weeks to provision new resources,” says Vassallo.

The organization has also moved from one new business application release per month to more than two per week. Additionally, the company’s employees always have mobile access to all applications. “Using AWS, we can make sure 3,000 users can reliably operate on our business systems,” says Vassallo.

Mitigating Risk, Differentiating the Business

Sara Assicurazioni fully complies with stringent financial services regulations because of the built-in security and compliance of the AWS Cloud. “We trust AWS to help us secure our full application platform, which helps us mitigate risk and comply with GDPR and other regulations,” says Vassallo. Sara Assicurazioni has also become more innovative because it can experiment with new services on AWS, which enables the creation of next-generation machine learning solutions. 

For example, Sara Assicurazioni recently developed and tested a new machine learning application to prevent fraud on claims. “Because of the agility we have on AWS, we can quickly create new applications that move our business ahead” says Vassallo.

Learn More

To Learn more, visit AWS Cloud Security.