Amazon VGT2 Las Vegas: How Cover-More Expanded Its Insurance Platform with AWS Managed Services

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Cover-More, a prominent global travel insurance provider under the Zurich Insurance Group umbrella, recently secured the opportunity to deliver travel insurance services to Booking.com across Europe. To effectively manage this new distribution channel, Cover-More set an ambitious objective: to establish a secure, adaptable, and robust insurance platform in Ireland within a three-month timeframe—without any IT personnel on-site.

This transformation required Cover-More to rethink not only the development and deployment of their products but also their IT infrastructure operations. To achieve this, they opted to utilize AWS Managed Services (AMS) to oversee their infrastructure operations. This managed service was configured to comply with Cover-More’s corporate and security policies while allowing the company to maintain its existing CI/CD development practices. This post highlights Cover-More’s successful execution and the associated business advantages of the new platform.

Strategic Approach

Cover-More’s strategy for launching their new platform involved several key components:

1. Enable: An AWS Managed Landing Zone (MALZ) was established, providing a multi-account architecture designed to streamline authentication, security, networking, backup, patching, and logging.
2. Build: AWS collaborated with Cover-More to adapt their existing on-premises insurance suite into a scalable, widely accessible platform.
3. Operate: AWS Managed Services (AMS) facilitated the provisioning, operation, and support of Cover-More’s infrastructure on AWS. AMS automates standard activities such as change requests, monitoring, patch management, security measures, and backup services.

Business Benefits – Insights from Cover-More

• Organizational Impact: This transformation has allowed Cover-More to deliver a secure and efficient platform for Booking.com, along with the flexibility needed to introduce new products and services for European customers in the future. The revised approach to IT operations has accelerated our global target operating model, aiding in the seamless scaling and automation of core applications worldwide. This foundational platform will continue to provide substantial benefits for Cover-More in the long run.
• Security Assurance: Given the nature of the insurance industry, security and compliance are paramount. The reassurance that AMS Managed Landing Zone adheres to various security frameworks (like PCI, SOC, and ISO) has instilled confidence that customer data is well protected.
• Staff Efficiency: This initiative strategically transitioned our EMEA region to the cloud. The collaborative team employed a meticulous and flexible approach to meet the demands within a tight deadline. As a result, over 40% of staff resources were redirected from routine infrastructure duties, allowing for a greater focus on transforming application development and deployment on AWS.

Our ultimate aim is to establish a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) team focused on creating reusable patterns and reference architectures. This strategy will simplify service consumption within AWS, enabling our global teams to launch new products faster than ever. For further insights, check out this other blog post.

Building a Resilient Global Business

With a proven capability for global expansion, Cover-More has set ambitious growth targets that will be addressed through various initiatives, including:

• A scalable infrastructure operating model applicable to all Cover-More locations worldwide.
• Continuous enhancement of our Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE).
• Migration to AWS from remaining on-premises data centers in Australia, LATM, and the USA.
• Ongoing application improvements through component segmentation into microservices using Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda.
• Transitioning to more AWS managed services like Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), freeing up additional time for our infrastructure team. For expert insights on this topic, visit their website.

Conclusion

This case study illustrates Cover-More’s ability to swiftly deploy their core insurance platform in a new geographical area without the necessity of building an infrastructure operations team. For more details on how AWS can assist in migrating and managing your workload in the cloud, refer to this excellent resource.