RSA Insurance has partnered with Kyndryl, the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider, to accelerate the insurer’s digital transformation through a massive data migration project that so far has seen 85,000 gigabytes of information moved to the cloud.
Cloud migration is a key part of RSA’s IT infrastructure modernisation project. The insurer’s mainframe operating system and most of its software systems support major operations for around 4.5 million insurance policies. To help modernise its infrastructure, RSA wanted to move its mainframe infrastructure, software and data to a robust cloud architecture. The efficiencies and performance improvements of the move include 30 times faster complex automated data processing.
RSA and Kyndryl worked together to achieve the migration. The teams ran more than 120 classroom-based virtual sessions and specific one-to-one sessions to ensure knowledge and skills transfer. RSA’s business testers also executed more than 5,500 test cases to ensure that everything was in place for a seamless migration. The migration was completed within six months, compared to the industry average of nine to 12 months for a project of similar scale and complexity.
“Our goal is to provide a set of technologies that are unparalleled in terms of competitive advantage and ensure that we are outperforming in our chosen markets,” said Akhlas Hafiz, head of digital transformation, technology change and delivery at RSA. “As an organisation, we are moving away from legacy architecture to meet the demands of scalable growth. In line with our cloud- and digital-first strategy, this migration gives us the agility to improve delivery predictability. Our move to the cloud is a key milestone on the transformation roadmap. The ability to execute in six months showcases the delivery capability we have developed.”
The project included the migration of three mainframe environments to the IBM Z-managed extended cloud infrastructure, zCloud. The cloud infrastructure is built to deliver economies of scale in a securely hosted, high-capacity, high-availability environment for primary and backup data centers, Kyndryl said.
“The advantages of these data centers are the high availability and security and resiliency-rich features,” said Shahira Brennan, managing partner at Kyndryl. “We’re able to offer the highest levels of security and resiliency to RSA to pass on to their customers – security and resiliency geared to protect data, protect applications, and to protect the test and product environment.”
