Australian well being insurer nib’s cloud migration began in 2015. However, it wasn’t till 9 years later, in 2024, that it was capable of full the migration of 100% of on-premise workloads, 95% to Amazon Web Services and the remaining 5% to different cloud platforms.
nib Chief Information Officer Brendan Mills mentioned venture prioritisation proved to be a problem, with IT balancing growth-related enterprise tasks alongside the migration. He mentioned the completed venture positions nib effectively for utilizing AI, which is being piloted for plenty of use instances.
SEE: Comparing cloud choices? See our comparability of AWS with Google Cloud.
Who is nib, and why is its cloud migration a giant deal?
Australia’s nib is a Top-100 ASX-listed non-public well being insurer. With a bunch income of AUD $1.7 billion final 12 months (US $1.1 billion), it affords well being and medical insurance coverage to 1.6 million Australian and New Zealand residents, and paid out $1.2 billion in claims over the past reporting interval.
In addition to being amongst Australia’s largest medical health insurance gamers, nib can be:
- An Australian high three participant and international distributor of journey insurance coverage.
- A number one supplier of medical health insurance for worldwide college students and employees in Australia, the place it insures round 200,000 worldwide college students and employees.
- Has an curiosity in Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme, the place it has achieved a number of acquisitions and helps 40,000 contributors by way of its nib Thrive enterprise.
- Maintains a majority stake in medtech organisation Midnight Health, which has offered entry to healthcare by way of telehealth companies to greater than 160,000 Australians.
- Has an information science and repair three way partnership with Cigna Corporation referred to as Honeysuckle Health.
nib’s measurement, footprint and operations in a regulated business imply its all-in transfer to the cloud is important. The venture wanted to think about key dangers reminiscent of paying insurance coverage in a well timed method to clients, safeguarding buyer information and minimising danger for buyers.
Why did nib determine to maneuver every little thing to the cloud?
nib first began to experiment with the cloud in late 2015. Mills mentioned that, like many massive Australian companies, it began small with a view to accelerating shortly. The enterprise was primarily motivated by the agility that it believed transferring to the cloud might deliver.
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The shift to the cloud was not all by design. Through merger and acquisition exercise and development, together with the operation of a giant journey insurance coverage arm, nib had seven disparate information centres; one in all these was nib-owned, whereas the others have been a mix of co-located information centres.
“We saw the benefits of a more focused investment in technology that would benefit our customers, as opposed to managing data centres and infrastructure,” Mills defined.
Moving a major insurance coverage system of file to AWS
In 2019, nib migrated its company medical health insurance enterprise GU Health to AWS. This marked a major enhance in its use of cloud companies, and one of many Australian medical health insurance business’s earliest migrations of an insurance coverage system of file to the cloud in Australia.
Through the ultimate levels of the migration, nib has moved different a number of Extreme Inherent Risk methods. “By transferring these EIR systems, we’ve further fortified our technology backbone, ensuring that critical operations are running on advanced and resilient platforms,” Mills mentioned.
Key learnings from nib’s epic cloud migration venture
nib achieved the migration of 95% of its on-premise workloads into the AWS cloud in February 2024, after the closure of the final of its seven information centres. Mills mentioned the remaining 5% of its workloads are supported by different cloud suppliers and SaaS methods. These are a number of the learnings from this cloud migration venture.
Choose a cloud supplier aligned along with your cloud technique
Mills mentioned AWS was chosen because the well being insurer’s major cloud associate on the again of its product set, its scale and its robust means to associate with clients. nib is sustaining a 5% toehold with different suppliers as a deliberate technique to supply it with future optionality.
This was a consideration for nib in addition to insurance coverage regulator APRA, who’s absolutely aligned with nib’s method. “I’m not suggesting we will up our tent and move campground, but some of those applications have been refactored, and we have some optionality around some of those.”
Internal prioritisation can place stress on venture timeframes
The largest venture situation was the momentum and prioritisation hurdles encountered after the venture began in 2017. Mills admitted that “we would have liked this to happen earlier,” although nib was nonetheless taking a really methodical and risk-conscious method to the venture.
Mills defined that it’s usually “hard to get executive colleagues excited about cloud migration” and that cloud and infrastructure was by no means seen as a cause to not help enterprise development. This meant balancing priorities between different enterprise know-how wants and the migration.
Working with regulators can require important time funding
nib labored carefully with APRA to fulfill its stringent cloud adoption requirements and necessities. This is taken into account essential for methods of file, which preserve info important for an establishment to find out its obligations to clients and counterparties.
Mills mentioned nib spent a number of time all through the method consulting with APRA, together with working up artefacts and offering info on its migration to make sure that it aligned with cloud computing steering. He mentioned, whereas he wouldn’t name this difficult, “there was a lot of it.”
SEE: The challenges and advantages of cloud migration
Expect technical challenges as merchandise and purposes evolve
There have been some technical elements encountered all through the venture; Mills mentioned this occurred in some instances the place a product set had developed or purposes wanted refactoring. However, he mentioned the enterprise went in with “eyes wide open” to those prospects.
Entrench cloud optimisation as an “evergreen and ongoing” course of
The well being insurer’s cloud optimisation is one thing that it continues to take a look at. Mills mentioned this sees the enterprise sitting down “shoulder to shoulder” with AWS to take a look at cloud spending by way of a finops lens to optimise and guarantee it’s “paying for the right things.”
What advantages does nib anticipate after its cloud migration?
Mills mentioned the finished cloud migration will present nib with an expansive atmosphere that may be dialed-up or down, which can be value environment friendly and permits higher member information analytics.
“The move is very much a strategic decision on many fronts,” he mentioned.
“We are confident about the environment; AWS provides us with agility and flexibility, and allows nib to build capability in the way we operate our business and contain costs.”
SEE: The cloud computing future, in line with Gartner
AI use instances being explored throughout nib’s enterprise
nib expects the cloud to permit it to increase its present use and future exploration of synthetic intelligence. The well being insurer is already experimenting with or deploying use instances for generative AI in plenty of areas, together with “nibby”, an AI-powered voice and textual content chatbot.
nibby, which had managed 3.2 million buyer queries since its first launch in 2017, was developed and enhanced utilizing AWS companies, together with Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Lex. SageMaker is designed to assist organisations construct, practice and deploy machine studying fashions, whereas Lex is a managed AI service for constructing conversational interfaces.