Zurich Insurance Group plans to move 1,000 applications to AWS by 2025 – including core insurance application and SAP workloads. The multi-year collaboration with AWS is in support of Zurich’s digital strategy to deliver new digital customer experiences and drive automation at scale.
By moving its critical applications to the cloud, Zurich will be simplifying, modernising, and automating the company’s enterprise IT infrastructure. This approach will provide the insurance group a flexible and scalable application environments that enables an agile product development.
Zurich will develop and bring new products to market quicker, saving approximately US$30 million a year.
“We want to help our retail customers lead safer and healthier lives, and bring our business customers peace of mind, by using the power of digital technologies to meet their evolving needs,” said Ericson Chan, group chief information and digital officer at Zurich.
Zurich will use AWS’s global infrastructure, advanced analytics, and machine learning technologies – specifically Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Aurora (AWS’s fully managed MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud), and AWS App Runner (AWS’s service to quickly deploy containerised web applications and APIs).
“Working with AWS will transform the way we bring solutions to market and enable us to make the most accurate and up-to-date insights available to our customers. We look forward to using the new AWS Region in Switzerland to support our regulatory reporting requirements."
Ericson Chan, Zurich Insurance Group
Focus on innovation
As a result of its partnership with AWS, the company can focus on innovation and new customer experiences, reinvesting valuable resources into new business opportunities, recruitment, and acquisition strategies.
By embracing cloud technologies, Zurich will also be able to streamline and optimise its core business processes and better prepare for new reporting requirements in 2023, including alignment with international financial reporting standards—IFRS 9 and IFRS 17.
Zurich will use RISE with SAP on AWS, a fully managed offering that combines SAP’s solution and implementation experience with AWS' experience in helping customers transform their SAP landscapes on the cloud.
By migrating its SAP environment to AWS, Zurich will create a modern, cloud-based system connecting data across its entire business. The SAP workloads migration will consist of 20 landscapes, a collection of servers for a specific workload, including more than 100 individual systems such as human resources (HR) and finance.
AWS’s extensive SAP experience will allow the insurance group to increase the performance of its SAP applications and integrate its data with advanced analytics and machine learning services to gain predictive capabilities and enterprise-wide reporting.
“Zurich’s focus on customers and innovation over the last 150 years is why it remains a leading insurer for more than 55 million people and businesses around the world,” said Matt Garman, senior vice president of sales, marketing, and global services at AWS.
“Moving their most critical business applications to AWS allows Zurich to put data at the heart of its business to automate processes, increase efficiency, and improve customer responsiveness.”
Matt Garman, AWS
He added: “Combining Zurich’s financial expertise with AWS’s broad functionality will help the insurer continue to evolve its business to anticipate customer needs, and provide more personalised insurance products.”
Skills development
Meanwhile, Zurich is working with AWS Skills Guild, a comprehensive skills enablement program that helps organisations accelerate cloud outcomes by creating excitement, increasing employee engagement, and nurturing a culture of learning.
The insurance provider has already trained more than 400 employees, with plans to further grow the program. Zurich offers skills development opportunities to help attract and train new employee talent, and accelerate cloud adoption across the company.
