InsurTech

Homesite

VividCloud Migrates Large Insurance Platform to AWS

At A Glance:

515%

reduction in quote-to-bind time in new architecture

17

VividCloud teams span the parent enterprise

4

years of successful partnership

About The Client:

American Family Insurance (AmFam) is a Fortune 200 company based in Madison, WI with 14 subsidiary operating companies.

Homesite, based in Boston, MA, is one of the key operating companies under AmFam. Homesite pioneered a direct-to-consumer business model to sell and support insurance products for Property & Casualty and Auto.

Executive Summary

Homesite Insurance burst on the insurance scene with a direct-to-consumer business model that bypassed the traditional insurance agent. Their first twenty years boasted great success. To continue their tremendous growth, they made a strategic decision to migrate their legacy platform to a cloud-based architecture with AWS as the chosen platform. After a successful proof of concept, Homesite found an AWS-experienced partner.

Homesite engaged VividCloud to help complete the architecture and implement the new AWS-based platform. During the migration, Homesite’s parent company, AmFam, realized the strategic opportunities of such a platform and assumed control of the project with a broadened scope across all their operating companies.

VividCloud is handling the entire ETL pipeline soup-to-nuts… [they’re] helping to solve the problems important to our success and we rely on their availability to do other work for us. As always, it’s a pleasure to work with the entire team at VividCloud.

Chris Gillett
Director of DevOps, Homesite Insurance

Key Challenges

  • The legacy platform had become difficult and expensive to update
  • Many monolithic applications instead of a microservices-based architecture
  • The legacy platform was developed for one business. The new platform needed to support 14 operating companies with broader requirements
  • The legacy platform faced SLA challenges, especially around latency
  • Data governance challenges, including legacy non-compliance with CDPA
  • Asset branding of each company was a large burden but was mission-critical
  • Monitoring and traceability of end-to-end transactions was absent
  • Security lagged far behind the modern standard

Solutions

VividCloud reviewed the client’s deep discovery of the components of the legacy platform, and the intricate interdependencies between components and individual applications. The preference of the key client stakeholder was to approach the entire design with some formalism around the definition of an AWS migration strategy, and thus tasks were described accordingly in the early phases of the design.

VividCloud and Homesite identified those critical components that required a new architecture to achieve the goals for dramatically expanded capabilities and ability to scale. These components were critical to the success of the migration and were prioritized for Rearchitecting and Refactoring. In successive waves of assessment, the other components of the legacy system were identified to be addressed via the other “R’s” of the AWS migration strategy, and a plan was developed.

7 Rs Classic AWS Migration Strategy

The project plan was described in a classic AWS framework. This meant identifying which pieces to Refactor, Replatform, Repurchase, Rehost, Relocate, Retain, and Retire.

Success Breeds Success

The reward for good work is trust… and more work! Homesite and VividCloud formed a successful, years-long partnership based on this first project. VividCloud is proud to have had 50 people at a time, and 80 overall, assisting with Homesite and American Family efforts.

AWS Services Provided

  • AWS Route 53 to provide DNS for public facing web traffic
  • AWS CloudFormation for replicable Infrastructure and Code
  • AWS Cognito User Pools, Identity pools for User authentication and authorization
  • AWS Lambda for Serverless execution of an event-driven architecture
  • AWS CloudTrail to audit activities in the AWS Accounts
  • AWS SNS for simple email notifications

…and dozens more

End Results

The initial release of the Enterprise One Platform “E1P” was successful and launched to commercial success. The deployment plan has been carefully executed, with staged rollouts across business lines, and more importantly, across states.

The first releases have provided service to seven states, and a monthly release cadence is now being maintained until the entire country is brought online. In the meantime, all Service Level Agreements between AmFam and the partnering companies governing transaction times and other performance requirements have been executed without issue — a notable achievement in a very complex and intertwined industry. The E1P platform is now the template and springboard for further planned evolutions of a unified insurance platform across many operating companies.

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