US-Based Insurance Broker brings agility to their business with timely digital transformation
Leveraging 5-3-2 Rule to maximize growth and amplify global clientele
50%
Rise in Overall Business Growth
30%
Improved Productivity
20%
Increase in Database Performance
Industry: Insurance Services |
Emp Size: 5800+ |
Estd.in: 1998 |
Headquarters: NewYork |
Forced into the pandemic, every business had to reshuffle their existing operations and streamline their ongoing structure. Although Insurance is known for financial protection during uncertainty, the entire world was experiencing one-of-its-kind uncertainty this time. NFP’s cloud migration case study is an example of embracing advanced technologies at the right time to make positive business impact at such an unprecedented time.
Established in 1998, NFP specializes in property and casualty, corporate benefits, retirement, and individual solutions. Having a team of 5500+ finance experts from different industries, NFP has offices in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Puerto Rico.
Embracing the changing environment, their timely digital transformation armed their employees to successfully work remotely within the new business landscape and helped them engage with clients around the world. In an exclusive coverage in FinTech Magazine, Mike Goldman, President and Chief Operating Officer of NFP, quoted,
“We did decide to move all of our own information to the cloud because we thought it was a much nimblerkind of process. We continue to have a flexible environment around technology so we can plug things in or out as they become better for us and for our clients. It’s been our philosophy to be as flexible as we can with technology because the pace of change isn’t slowing down,”.
NFP was aiming towards full scale Digital Transformation that could simplify the insurance buying process for clients and support their growth objective. To make this happen, Microsoft recommended Motifworks, to perform an end-to-end infrastructure assessment followed by datacenter migration.
To create a successful cloud migration case study Motifworks engaged with NFP right away. Our advance specialization in App Modernization, expertise in designing & implementing end-to-end enterprise solutions with Azure Migration services using both IaaS and PaaS services, made us the partner of choice for NFP.
Overcoming customer challenges in this cloud migration case study
Keeping Pace with Aggressive Business Initiatives
NFP was expanding its offereings through a combination of strategic acquisitions and steady organic growth. As part of each acquisition, their IT department was tasked with integrating the acquired companies’ data centers to standardize and centralize their environments in to the NFP Center of Excellence. After they unified its business units and member companies under their brand, it resulted in several challenges for the IT team. Some critical challenges faced by the IT team included:
• Disparate internal resources, applications, and systems
• Inefficiencies, and high cost of integrating mergers & acquisitions
• Gaps in Disaster Recovery postures
The degree of Azure expertise and Motifworks Azure Financial Services, cemented the firm’s plans to leverage them for the implementation of their cloud infrastructure and application strategy.
Since, their current infrastructure comprised of consolidation of 800-1000 servers across 10 Datacenters located through the US, UK, and Canada, these integrations required detailed evaluation of current infrastructure, processes, and security. So, we stepped in to help NFP execute the datacenter integrations into their hybrid cloud leveraging Microsoft Azure. NFP was looking to setup a team of Azure Infrastructure engineers to extend NFP’s IT department to integrate the backlog of pending integrations and streamline future projects.
A series of M&A was leading to spiraling IT infrastructure cost, and as a result, making them desperate for a solution that would be cost-effective, productive, and efficient. In addition to the IT infrastructure cost, disparate IT systems for various business functions and gaps in disaster recovery plans were hampering operational efficiency.
Since NFP was not operating in a service delivery model, it caused lag in the unification of business units and companies under the NFP Brand. Fast approaching deadlines for compliance with SOC2, regulation relating to controls for security, availability, integrity & privacy were creating a sense of urgency.
Technologies
Cloud Strategy and Economics |
Cloud Governance and Architecture |
DevOps and SQL PaaS Modernization |
Solution
Leverage Microsoft Azure for Centralization, Flat IT costs, and Operational Efficiency
We supported NFP by leveraging on-demand capacity of Azure and create a scalable solution, allowing them to service requirements such as VDI and other infrastructure needs for dev/test environments. The teams began by discussing how they could phase out old approaches, then transition from on-premises to infrastructure-as-a- service and eventually platform-as-a-service.
The overall solution provided the organization with Azure application architecture, design, deployment, monitoring, and cloud maintenance to build a solid foundation for the underlying technology.
Implementation
By implementing Azure Cloud for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS we were able to reduce data center footprint, centralization of IT, and support for international M&A initiatives. Next, we built the design architecture for their on-premise solutions to be moved to the cloud. Upon development, we deployed the company’s desired resources into Azure and all its security measures thereafter.
After deployment, a disaster recovery solution was developed that was based on the company’s evolving requirements. In this cloud Azure migration case study, we know NFP is known for their growth enablement and specializes in investing in innovation on mitigating risk by working from home and they have generated multiple new business opportunities.
Results
Responsive and Cost-Efficient Environment to Support Business Growth
The results of NFP's migration to Azure cloud environment were spectacular. Year-over-year they have been providing incredible value during the company's rapid growth.
Due to a solid foundation in Azure for DR (Disaster Recovery) planning and deployment, they were able to The cloud migration has given them agility to build global clientele, invest in companies that create real-value to their clients’ businesses providing an exceptional customer experience, in any geography. Some of the noteworthy results that they are proud about are:
“We’ve accomplished even more than we had set out to do,” said the company’s SVP. “That is driving some of our other technology groups—while they may not be owned entities of our company—to come and ask us how we can help them move to the cloud, because they’ve heard about our team and our results working with Motifworks.”
95%
of Workforce performing
remote work amid COVID-19
50%
Company Growth while
IT costs remain flat
30%
Increase in Productivity after
migrating to Azure
20%
Improvement in Database
Performance
3000
users Spin up in Virtual Desktop in 48 hours
Conclusion: A True Partnership
Today, NFP's leadership describes their relationship with us as “a true partnership,” unlike those with other. The company’s decision-makers continue to turn to Motifworks for their projects, since we have established ourselves as “go-to” team for accelerating the way they architect and determine their solutions for all mission-critical cloud strategies.
In this Azure migration case study, you will learn that we also successfully trained their internal team—which had only physical data centre experience—to build a data centres in Azure. The company has realized an unexpected increase in performance. Since then, they have migrated 5 of the data-centers in Azure, including licensing, and built a cloud infrastructure to support the company’s strategy.
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