DXC Technology

Ambitious data center migration project kicks off major digital transformation

The London insurance market—the largest in the world—represents 7.6% of the total global commercial (re)insurance business, employs around 50,000 people, and makes up almost a quarter of the City of London’s GDP. Made up of insurance and reinsurance companies, Lloyd’s syndicates, Protection & Indemnity clubs, and brokers, the London market is on a journey to become more data-focused, automated, and cost-efficient. This strategic, multi-year digital transformation is being implemented by the London Market Joint Ventures (XIS and XCS), a shareholding between DXC Technology, Lloyd’s and the International Underwriting Association (IUA). As the lead technology partner in the transformation, DXC plays an instrumental role in transforming the London insurance market from a largely paper-based, analogue set of processes to a marketplace that is digital, efficient, and data-first.

The data center migration was a key step in enabling the delivery of faster, more flexible and resilient services to the insurance market. DXC involved over a dozen partners to team up for this major milestone in the London market’s journey to the cloud: migrating 70 billion rows of data, 700 IT assets, and over 200 business applications onto a simplified and more advanced on-premises enterprise data center solution. Over 500 global DXC engineers collaborated with an extensive technology partner network on the migration, spanning three mission-critical environments: production, disaster recovery, and test service.

Andy Evans, Delivery Director for DXC, explains further: “Our state-of-the art, resilient data centers have high-speed connectivity to cloud providers, modern hardware, cooling, and power supplies. This shift included migrating mission-critical mainframe-based applications to more advanced hardware platforms as part of efforts to mitigate legacy technology risk and improve performance across the market. We have extensive experience with Migrate, a solution to easily migrate physical, virtual, and cloud workloads of any size and complexity to and from any environment with minimal risk and near-zero downtime. Minimal downtime was crucial for the London insurance market in this project, and the capabilities of Migrate, combined with the strong Micro Focus (now OpenText) support model, made it a good choice for us.”

When a ‘big bang’ approach is necessary due to essential business continuity, a solution such as Migrate helps to increase the chance of success. It saved us weeks of effort, ensured minimal downtime, and helped us achieve 100 percent accountability and auditability.

Migrate and OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) support saved weeks of effort

Migrate follows a streamlined process that automates and consolidates numerous operations that are otherwise manual and prone to human error. With just a few simple steps, it reduces the amount of work needed to accomplish migration goals. The solution has capabilities that make it particularly suitable for large-scale migrations in complex environments; just what was required in this scenario. Specifically, it has flexibility in migrating environments with restricted network access, which was very helpful in the London insurance market migration project. To prepare for the migration with full transparency, Universal Discovery and Universal CMDB was leveraged to create a complete IT asset and configuration inventory across more than one billion combined attributes.

The multi-year planning process culminated in a ‘big bang’ migration over a weekend, to minimize market disruption. It was DXC’s largest and most ambitious data center migration to date. The entire London insurance market operations, including all the data, applications, and business processes, were moved from one set of data centers to the DXC strategic data center. DXC clearly communicated very transparent rules to every technology partner involved. “Successful partnering is the key to success when operating at this scale,” comments Evans. “It requires meticulous stakeholder management and planning. We felt reassured that Micro Focus (now OpenText) support was easily accessible and responsive. While the number of incidents was minimal, timely log evaluation and issue resolution ensured minimal incident impact.”

To ensure data integrity, users had to be logged-out, applications and databases stopped, internal and external access halted, and all batch processing and backups completed. “When a ‘big bang’ approach is necessary due to essential business continuity, a solution such as Migrate helps to increase the chance of success,” says Evans. “It saved us weeks of effort, ensured minimal downtime, and helped us achieve 100 percent accountability and auditability.”

Minimal downtime was crucial for the London insurance market project, and the capabilities of Migrate, combined with the strong Micro Focus (now OpenText) support model, made it a good choice for us.

New resilient and high-performance cloud-based infrastructure

The successful data center migration sets the London insurance market up for further digital transformation and continuous improvement with enhanced connectivity and a consolidated infrastructure. Ultimately, key digital services will operate on a new cloud-based platform to enhance resilience, security, and agility. Evans concludes it’s been an important confidence builder for the market and puts the London market’s technology stack on a much more resilient and better performing cloud-based infrastructure.

“We are extremely pleased with the reliability and performance demonstrated by Migrate.”