In January, the insurance giant Suncorp announced a three-year agreement with Microsoft. The deal allows the insurer to increase use of the Microsoft Azure cloud and, said a media release, will help complete the migration of 90% of IT systems out of data centres and up to the cloud by the end of this year.
Suncorp is using two very big, or hyperscaler, cloud providers. The other is AWS. However, Charles Pizzato (pictured above) Suncorp’s executive general manager of IT infrastructure, said his firm is not at the mercy of cloud giants. Pizzato said his firm’s use of open-source, container software – in this case provided by the tech firm Red Hat – provides them with independence.
He said Suncorp puts Red Hat’s container software platform, OpenShift, “on top” of both of the cloud providers’ environments.
“We can, by changing a line of code, build an application to run on one, and change it so that it redeploys on to the other,” said Pizzato. “The actual fundamental container platform is the same, what hyper scaler it sits on is abstracted.”
He said this provides flexibility.
“For instance, if we’ve got a workload that needs to be proximal to a SaaS service that sits on top of Azure, we may choose to deploy that to Azure,” said Pizzato. “But there may be somewhere it doesn’t actually matter where they sit and then we’ve got that ability to move them or deploy them to whichever cloud provider offers us the best terms at that point in time.”
Another major advantage, suggested Pizzato, is independence.
“It also means that we are decoupled from the hyper scalers,” he said. “We’ve got more negotiation power at the end of our time because we can consider a large scale migration of one to another if they’re not going to be the chosen partner for us.”
Pizzato said this is “quite powerful.”
“That’s for workloads that are more microservices type architecture workloads, where we’re continuously building and deploying software to the cloud,” he said. Then comes the more traditional, server client architecture, the “legacy stack” he said.
“Of course, we’ve got a lot of that, every organization does - they’re the types of systems that are typically hosts that sit on top of VMware and data centres,” said Pizzato. “We’re in the process of moving those to a platform called AVS, which is VMware on Azure.”
He said this is “almost” the same concept as Red Hat – so using VMware to “abstract” the hyperscaler cloud provider.
“So, at the end of three years, if we decide that all those workloads that are going to Azure at the moment - which is basically all about VMs in the data centre - we might want to move those to AWS, or to Google, or wherever, it gives us that ability to rapidly migrate,” he explained.
Pizzato said there are range of advantages that come with using the cloud. “Ability to scale, the implicit jumpstart you get around things like security and standardization of environments and the way that it lets us then be able to effectively use things like continuous deployment pipelines to be able to build software in a cloud environment,” he said.
Pizzato said this allows his firm to engage in software development without having to deal with hindrances like legacy infrastructure, provisioning lead times and data centres.
However, the two cloud systems do have differences, said Pizzato.
“Microsoft and AWS have strengths in different areas and we are going to leverage the strengths of each hyper scaler appropriately to take advantage of what they do best,” he said. “AWS have a lot of different things that they do around the data and analytics space, Microsoft have been investing quite heavily in things like AI [artificial intelligence] and ChatGPT.”
In terms of comparing Suncorp’s digital journey and cloud use to other big insurers, Pizzato said there are things they are doing in this space “that are quite unique.”
“In terms of what we’re doing with cloud, I don’t think you’ll find that many of the other insurers in Australia are as advanced in cloud migrations as we are,” he said.
Pizzato referred to 90% of their systems moving to the cloud by the end of 2023. He said 70% have already migrated.
“I think everyone’s got a cloud strategy, and they’re all on the journey but where they are on that journey is vastly different,” he noted.
He said insurtechs, unburdened by legacy systems, are “very much on the right end of that [cloud digital journey] scale.” However, some of the big insurers, he suggested, are still lagging behind.
“The more traditional insurers are absolutely very focused around their digital strategies but have a large amount of legacy [systems] that they’re also working through,” he said. “Typically, you’ll find most of that still on premise for those organizations.”
According to industry definitions, hyperscalers are the big cloud providers that offer massive cloud computing resources. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud and Google Cloud would be on this list.
On its website, Red Hat describes OpenShift as “a unified platform to build, modernize, and deploy applications at scale.” A Wikipedia entry says “OpenShift is a family of containerization software products developed by Red Hat…a hybrid cloud platform as a service.”
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