Life Insurance Provider Leverages Cloud for Business Advantages

About Aegon Life

Aegon Life Insurance Company is a leading insurance provider in India. Headquartered in Mumbai, it is a joint venture between Dutch Aegon N.V., a multinational insurance, pensions and asset management company, and The Times Group, one of India’s largest media conglomerates. Aegon Life’s services include term life insurance, investment, savings and healthcare. It has 25 products on the market, including group plans and a term plan specific to rural areas.

The Challenges

Aegon Life wanted to leverage the AWS cloud platform to host its infrastructure and IT capabilities to benefit from “elastic” infrastructure and thereby improve time to market.

Aegon Life also wanted a knowledgeable premier partner that helps it to implement migration and the type of managed services that provide continuous cost-optimizations.

Aegon Life was impressed with the depth of the enterprise cloud migration framework presented by the Cloud Migration Services team, and the solutions it encompasses (see Figure 1). The team’s automated approach, and its experience creating DevOps accelerators, met Aegon Life’s criteria to ensure easier deployments in the future. These capababilites inspired confidence that the project would be completed quickly and professionally.

The Solution

Team architects analyzed Aegon Life’s unique requirements and conceived a custom solution. To ensure a rapid move from the company’s existing data centers to the AWS cloud platform, they took a multiphased approach that consisted of discovery, build and migration, configuration and testing, and cutover. Because Aegon Life operates in a highly regulated industry under strict compliance mandates, security and compliance remained top priorities throughout the process.

Aegon Life’s AWS architecture was multitiered, consisting of web, customer relationship management (CRM), and database components. Using network-file-system-based shared storage, the solution team was able to achieve high availability for the web and CRM servers. It implemented database disaster recovery using the AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) native multiple availability zone or multi-AZ capability. For database migration, the solution team restored a full backup of the on-premises database into the RDS instance and used AWS ElastiCache for in-memory storage.

AWS Services in the Solution

The Cloud Migration Services team made strong use of various AWS services, as shown in Figure 2.

Solution Architecture Diagram

To to leverage the benefits of the cloud for Aegon Life, the Cloud Migration Services team restructured the company’s IT environment, designing plans for migration and API integration (see Figures 3 and 4).

Business Benefits

The unique and accelerated solution provided the following benefits:

• Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) as Amazon’s EC2 or RDS instances are optimized, based on usage onboarding, in a few hours.
• Automation of deployment allows the infrastructure to be set up in any regional program and completed in four weeks.
• Data and applications reside in a secure infrastructure.
• High availability is supported for the complete solution.
• Expansion of business-to-business (B2B) services is enabled using APIs via the AWS serverless architecture.
• Improved disaster recovery capabilities are achieved by leveraging AWS native features.
• Automation is implemented for infrastructure and applications.