Bene Assicurazioni achieves cloud modernisation goals on AWS

Embracing the cloud to deliver innovative insurance services

Bene strived for more independence and flexibility in the development of products and services. The company saw this as a key factor in becoming more competitive and being able to further expand its business. This would not be possible in the long term with the use of on-premise technologies. 

By moving to the cloud, Bene aimed to increase flexibility and fostering innovation. The speed with which new infrastructure resources can be accessed and activated, as well as changes and configurations made, would take the company to a new level of operational efficiency and significantly accelerate time-to-market. 

The insurance provider also wanted to expand its online service offerings and make information access easier and faster for clients and for its agents at 400 local offices across Italy. It became clear that this could only be achieved with a robust, scalable and, above all, reliable infrastructure - especially at peak times. 

To achieve all these goals, Bene needed a partner who could set up the appropriate environment in the cloud, carry out the migration within a tight timeframe and train Bene’s internal teams to independently manage the new cloud infrastructure. 

“We were not just looking for advice,” says Zardoni. We wanted a partner who could guide us through this really important step of our digital transformation from start to finish. We chose SoftwareOne because of their extensive cloud expertise, their proven implementation skills demonstrated in other projects, and their professionalism in proposing an end-to-end solution that perfectly fits our needs.”

Assessing needs and optimising apps for migration to AWS

SoftwareOne conducted a comprehensive assessment of Bene’s existing infrastructure and applications, and determined that Amazon Web Services (AWS) would be the optimal cloud solution. Bene was already using certain selected cloud services on the three major hyperscale platforms. In addition, the company had adopted Amazon Connect for its contact centre operations, which gave it some familiarity and a positive working relationship with AWS.

Following AWS best practices, SoftwareOne developed a migration strategy to meet Bene’s needs. It also designed and implemented a new cloud infrastructure for Bene, including a landing zone. In preparing to migrate Bene's 50 servers running 10 applications to AWS, SoftwareOne also identified how to optimise the company's workloads for cloud-native applications. This helped to avoid some costs, reducing Bene's final costs by 40% compared to a pure lift-and-shift migration. It also significantly increased operational efficiency and enabled a faster release pace through the automation of building, testing and deploying procedures.

Among the support that SoftwareOne provided: 

• Guidance to minimise business disruption: This included many meetings with Bene to establish the steps that needed to be taken before and during the cutover and when these needed to happen. 
• Workload optimisation: This involved using reserved instances, right-sizing and corresponding licence cost optimisation, among other strategies.  
• Restructuring of business-critical apps: This was done using cloud-native services such as Amazon EC2, AWS Directory Service, Amazon RDS and AWS Database Migration Service.  
• PaaS focus: With this approach, Bene wouldn’t need to take over management of the underlying hardware and operating systems after migration. It also enabled Bene to consolidate licence contracts and reduce licence costs. All this frees up Bene to focus on application development, deployment and innovation. 
• Landing zone design: This provides Bene with easier security and identity management, improved automation and support for continuous optimisation and Cloud DevOps best practices. 
• Increasing cloud maturity: SoftwareOne helped Bene to become fully operational on its own within six months, thanks to the training and knowledge sharing provided by SoftwareOne. 

After extensive testing, Bene and SoftwareOne were ready for the actual migration. The move began late on a Friday afternoon, when Bene’s old infrastructure was shut down and SoftwareOne started exporting data to AWS. The new environment on AWS was activated on Saturday, and teams spent the rest of the weekend testing the system: the goal was to achieve a seamless migration so Bene’s agents could go back to work on Monday morning without any noticeable signs that systems had changed. 

Increasing cloud confidence with cost control 

As cloud consumption increased, Bene wanted better visibility and control to allocate consumption costs correctly. Although Bene had been using the SoftwareOne Marketplace, a digital platform for buying, managing and monitoring software purchases, it had been buying AWS services directly from AWS. However, this changed when Bene wanted to gain better control over its AWS cloud spend. By adopting SoftwareOne Cloud Managed Services Essentials for AWS, the finance and IT teams were able to more easily manage cloud spend and support their cloud estate.

The SoftwareOne Marketplace gives Bene greater visibility into its AWS cloud costs. They can transparently track and allocate costs at department and project level, and benefit from improved billing and consolidated invoicing. Risks and unpleasant surprises in cloud usage are avoided through robust access management as well as early detection, alerting and investigation of spending anomalies. Outsourcing all these activities to SoftwareOne relieves Bene's teams and gives them more stability and confidence in their cloud spend management through data-driven decisions.