Amazon VGT2 Las Vegas: Cover-More’s Regional Insurance Platform Launch Using AWS Managed Services

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Cover-More, an esteemed global travel insurance provider under Zurich Insurance Group, recently secured a pivotal partnership with Booking.com to offer travel insurance services in Europe. In order to facilitate this new distribution channel, Cover-More set an ambitious target: to establish a secure, adaptable, and resilient insurance platform in Ireland within a three-month timeframe, all without any onsite IT personnel.

To achieve this, Cover-More recognized the need to overhaul not only their product development and launch strategies but also their IT infrastructure operations. They opted to utilize AWS Managed Services (AMS) for the management of their infrastructure operations. Through this managed service, Cover-More was able to implement their corporate and security policies effectively while still leveraging their existing CI/CD development practices. This account will outline the steps Cover-More took to realize their objectives and the business advantages provided by the new platform.

Strategic Approach

Cover-More’s strategy for launching their platform encompassed several key elements:

1. Enable: A new AWS Managed Landing Zone (MALZ) was established. This architecture is designed to facilitate multiple AWS accounts, pre-configured for authentication, security, networking, backup, patching, and logging.
2. Build: Collaborating with AWS, Cover-More transformed their previous on-premises insurance suite into an elastic and widely accessible platform.
3. Operate: AWS Managed Services (AMS) was employed to provision, run, and support Cover-More’s infrastructure on AWS. AMS automates routine activities such as change requests, monitoring, patch management, security, and backup services.

Business Advantages

According to Cover-More, this transformation has enabled them to deliver a secure and high-performance platform for Booking.com while providing the agility needed to introduce new products and services across Europe in the future. This fresh approach to IT operations has accelerated their global target operating model, which is essential for scaling and automating core applications worldwide. Cover-More anticipates significant long-term benefits from this foundational platform.

From a security standpoint, compliance is paramount in the insurance industry. The assurance that their new AMS Managed Landing Zone adheres to various security frameworks, including PCI, SOC, and ISO, has bolstered their confidence in data protection for customers.

The project was executed by a blended team that applied a disciplined and strategic approach, demonstrating professionalism and adaptability to meet tight deadlines. This efficiency has allowed Cover-More to redirect over 40% of their staff resources away from routine infrastructure tasks. Their primary focus is now on transforming how applications are built and deployed on AWS. They aim to establish a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) to develop reusable patterns and reference architectures, thus streamlining service consumption within AWS and enabling faster product market entry globally.

Future-Proofing a Global Business

With a proven ability to expand internationally, Cover-More has set high growth targets that will be pursued through various initiatives focused on global expansion, migration, and employee upskilling while driving continuous innovation:

• An infrastructure operating model that can be scaled to Cover-More’s other global locations.
• Ongoing refinement and enhancement of their cloud center of excellence (CCOE).
• Migration of remaining on-premises data centers in Australia, LATM, and the USA to AWS.
• Continuous application improvement by breaking down components into microservices, utilizing products like Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda.
• Transition towards more AWS managed services, such as Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), which will free up additional time for infrastructure staff.

In conclusion, this case study illustrates Cover-More’s capability to swiftly deploy their core insurance platform into a new geographical area without the necessity of establishing an infrastructure operations team. For additional insights into AWS’s role in migrating and managing workloads in the cloud, be sure to check out this other blog post.

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