Helvetia

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Project Summary.

Services provided:

Cloud Migration and Modernisation

In partnership with:

AWS

Client industry:

Financial Services

Client location:

Switzerland

About.

Helvetia Insurance Group is an international insurance group with strong Swiss roots.

For many years, we have helped them migrate applications from their data centre to AWS (read the case study here).

This case study focuses on their Doxis document management system, a business-critical application that couldn’t be migrated with a standard approach. It gives an overview on how we overcame challenges and ensured a successful migration of a ‘must-work’ application with direct business impact.

Business continuity

Doxis has over 1,000 end users and heavy processes running nearly 24/7. It enables efficient customer service, and timely access to contract information during phone calls is crucial for maintaining customer satisfaction.

Compatibility

Fat clients are applications that do most of their processing locally rather than relying on a server. They posed a significant challenge for the migration because proper functioning was critical for end user acceptance, business continuity and customer support. The migration was impeded by difficulties testing fat clients for anticipated performance issues at production scale.

Fallback requirements

The previous migration attempt was impeded by the inability to test certain performance issues on production scale without having a guaranteed ability to fallback/rollback within a lengthy 12-hour window.

Ensuring fallback.

We created a fallback/rollback process that met the 12-hour window. When we proved it was achievable overnight between 2 business days, the migration was given a green light.

Reducing technical debt.

We undertook detailed analysis of database and fat client behaviour, network re-architecting and ways to simplify the fallback/rollback process. This informed a migration approach that ensured business continuity as well as data integrity.

Controlled migration.

The migration process was executed in a scripted and automated fashion with a high level of control and monitoring. It took place over a weekend.

Results.

Thanks to the calculated risk approach and controlled migration process, no incidents were reported during the initial 2 weeks of operation post-migration.

In the first 6 hours on the Monday after the weekend migration, there were no complaints, proving that we met business continuity requirements. For the first 2 weeks under hypercare, Doxis continued operating smoothly in its new IaaS environment – with no incidents reported.

The project strengthened the partnership between Helvetia and Nordcloud. The careful preparation, technical problem-solving and trust built during this challenging migration created a solid basis ongoing collaboration.