Engineering the Future: Swiss Life teams up with Deloitte Engineering and AWS for a comprehensive cloud modernization project
Introduction
To accelerate innovation and deliver modern financial services to its customers, 160-year-old insurance company Swiss Life Deutschland (Swiss Life) needed to transform its legacy IT environment. The insurance provider’s on-premises systems were costly, difficult to scale, and in some cases prone to periods of downtime. Operating in a highly regulated industry, Swiss Life migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help scale and secure its workloads. In collaboration with Deloitte Engineering and AWS, Swiss Life architected a resilient cloud environment built on infrastructure-as-code and open-source technologies. As a result, Swiss Life has improved developer productivity and can focus on delivering value to customers.
From Legacy to Cloud: Swiss Life's Transformation Story
Driving digital transformation in the financial services industry
Swiss Life is committed to helping its customers lead financially self-determined lives by providing expert financial advice and tailored insurance and pension solutions. The company operates in the German financial market, and has a workforce of 2,000 in addition to nearly 6,000 advisors.
Before migrating to the cloud, Swiss Life ran its workloads on legacy on-premise systems. However, its on-premise data centers required regular maintenance and generated significant debt, hindering the company’s ability to rapidly develop new services and scale to customer demand.
So, Swiss Life rolled out an initiative to drive digital transformation and, in turn, strengthen the company’s competitive advantage. “On AWS, we are not only responding to the enormous growth of our company in recent years and increasing our operational efficiency,” says Dr. Tobias Herwig, CTO at Swiss Life. “By using cloud technology, we can also be agile to market changes, offer new technologies to sales, and maximize the benefits for our customers.”
Collaborating with Deloitte Engineering and AWS to accelerate migration
Swiss Life’s digital transformation involved migrating its actuarial system, core billing system, profits application, and other critical business applications to the cloud. Above all, avoiding downtime and securing its environment was key. As part of the financial services industry (FSI), Swiss Life needed to comply with regional regulations, such as the GDPR, while maintaining data sovereignty.
Swiss Life chose Deloitte Engineering and AWS for their deep industry insights and purpose-built solutions for FSI companies. “Deloitte’s dual role as trusted advisor and auditor proved invaluable,” says Oliver Hackert, Managing Director and Head of IT Services and Operations at Swiss Life. “Their deep understanding of regulatory requirements and financial services challenges were key to the success of our cloud transformation.”
Swiss Life designed an architecture on infrastructure-as-code, open-source technology, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. The teams then worked together to enable a successful migration.
Exiting its data centers quickly was another priority. So, Swiss Life employed a lift-and-shift methodology to overcome resource and time constraints. It also used the AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), which has been trusted by customers globally to securely migrate more than 1 million databases with minimal downtime. Swiss Life securely stores its data in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), to simply manage its total cost of ownership.
Fueling developer productivity and optimizing IT costs by 25%
Swiss Life migrated 324 workloads and more than 1 PB of data with virtually no impact on its 8,000 business users. The company now benefits from near real-time security monitoring, and it can scale its computer resources as needed—helping to reduce its IT costs by 25%. “As a medium-sized company, we can better implement compliance and security requirements by working on a cloud basis,” says Herwig. “With our own data centers, we would not be able to meet this economically in the long term, and it would not meet our requirements for independent work and state-of-the-art IT.”
Greater levels of automation have enhanced developer productivity. Swiss Life’s teams spend less time on managing the company’s infrastructure, which has empowered them to focus on projects that deliver value to their customers. On average, its developers deploy security patches 25% faster than before, and the time spent managing SQL database servers has been cut by 98%. By standardizing on the cloud, its teams also reduced license management effort by 75%.
With a modernized tech stack, Swiss Life can respond to changes in the industry and customer preferences more quickly. “With the completion of our complex and ambitious project, we have become one of the first companies in our industry to successfully complete a full cloud transformation,” says Hackert. “The results speak for themselves: We’ve increased efficiency, accelerated innovation, and improved our resilience. Simultaneously, we’re setting new standards in an industry traditionally considered conservative in cloud adoption.”
Furthermore, Hackert says, “The cloud migration and data center exit paved the way for Swiss Life's data and AI strategy. With the scalability and speed of innovation the cloud provides, Swiss Life is now well positioned to leverage modern data, AI and GenAI capabilities.”
reduction in IT costs
data migrated with virtually no downtime
faster security patch deployments
less time spent on managing SQL servers
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