Insurance Company
We transformed the mortgage industry.
An Overview
The Challenge
This private mortgage insurance company’s IT infrastructure was aging. They needed a way to align IT goals with their business goals of increasing their financial strength, growing their franchise business, and improving operational effectiveness.
The Solution
We helped lift and shift 175 workloads into AWS, bridging the gap between the company’s IT and Business objectives, accelerating business growth, and improving profitability.
The Outcome
2nd Watch identified over 170 requirements necessary to transform the people, process, and technology aspects of its business, incorporating Amazon EC2 and CloudFront into its designs and continues to work with the company to accomplish its goals. Thanks to the migration, the company has gained accelerated business growth, improved profitability, lowered operation costs, and software lifecycle management.
01
About the Business
This insurance company connects lenders, homebuyers, investors, and loan servicers using a suite of private mortgage insurance and related risk management products and services. It helps promote and preserve the tradition of homeownership while protecting lenders from default-related losses on residential first mortgages. The company also facilitates the sale of low-down-payment mortgages in the secondary market.
02
The Business Challenges
In 2013, the company developed a new five-year strategic plan to capitalize on projected growth in the Private Mortgage Insurance market as the housing sector rebounded from the 2010 crash and to modernize its aging IT infrastructure. It’s business goals to increase the company’s financial strength, grow the franchise business and promote the role of Private Mortgage Insurance and improve operational effectiveness did not fully align with its IT goals to address issues with agility, efficiency, software lifecycle management, and eliminating gaps in capabilities.
The company’s IT executives developed a technology blueprint based on internal collaboration (Dev/Ops) and a framework by which developers and architects would have a consistent state of direction, be able to conduct ongoing detailed analysis, and make informed decisions. With this direction set and framework established, the insurance company embarked on a project to lift and shift 175 workloads into Amazon Web Services (AWS) while supporting the new business goals.
03
The 2nd Watch Solution & the Business Benefits
The company approached 2nd Watch during its exploratory phase as it began a search for a viable cloud partner. 2nd Watch hosted a two-day workshop to help the organization understand the intricacies of shifting workloads to the AWS Cloud. This opened up an opportunity for 2nd Watch Professional Services to provide a comprehensive assessment of the company’s on-premise infrastructure and applications and to complete a proof of concept. During this engagement, 2nd Watch demonstrated how its comprehensive knowledge of enterprise dynamics and the nuances of the AWS cloud would enable it to bridge the gap between the company’s IT and Business objectives and accomplish its goals faster and at a lower overall cost. Once 2nd Watch engaged, the project was accelerated.
Throughout the engagement 2nd Watch helped bridge the gap between the company’s business and IT goals by providing a detailed assessment of its applications and workloads, a framework for transforming its Software Development Lifecycle into a DevOps organization, and methodologies for High-Level Infrastructure Design, Detailed Infrastructure Design, and DevOps. 2nd Watch also implemented AWS Best Practices and provided an engineering roadmap, Dev/Ops implementation training, project management, cloud architectures, and templates, and will be assisting the company with Managed Cloud Services and IT staff training.
2nd Watch identified over 170 requirements necessary to transform the people, process, and technology aspects of its business, incorporating Amazon EC2 and CloudFront into its designs and continues to work with the company to accomplish its goals. Thanks to the migration, the company has gained accelerated business growth, improved profitability, lowered operation costs, and software lifecycle management.
