nib travel successfully adopts new cloud services, while integrating with an existing on-premises system.
INDUSTRY
Insurance
SERVICES
Cloud Migration
Overview
- Bringing Australian insurance technology to the global market
- Hybrid cloud: Modernise without a wholesale migration
- Infrastructure-as-code to deploy applications with the right resources
Servicing travellers across 134 countries is all in a day’s work at Australian travel insurance company nib travel, which includes World Nomads Group.
Since beginning nearly two decades ago, nib travel has been technology-driven and offers a range of travel solutions, including content, advice on travel safety, and emergency assistance.
With more than a million customer engagements a year, and some $150 million in revenue, the InsureTech eyed cloud to meet its global growth ambitions.
The Challenge
The term ‘hybrid cloud’ is used liberally within the IT industry, but at nib travel it is a core part of the company’s architecture.
The company originally developed fit-for-purpose applications before consolidating on a new insurance platform, dubbed ‘Kosmos’.
With Kosmos originally developed in-house, work began to split out the monolithic platform into a microservices architecture. Managing the impact of changes on any system – cloud or on-premises – is crucial.
Data integration, security and ensuring business processes continue to operate with resiliency are key to hybrid cloud success.
The Solution
The nib travel journey to cloud essentially consisted of three phases.
Firstly, the on-premises quote and sales system was isolated and followed by an AWS pilot project, the company’s first foray into cloud computing.
Then, the quotes API, AngularJS purchasing app and related components were migrated to the cloud. Following a six-month project nib Travel went live on AWS.
The third phase was to go multi-region across the globe to facilitate international expansion ambitions.
Quote and sales features needed to work locally in many global jurisdictions so the team deployed a copy of the components developed in Australia to the Ireland region of AWS.
The Results
The move from traditional application development models to a DevOps approach with Mantel Group and AWS had an immediate impact on the group’s ability to expand its services portfolio.
nib travel can now benefit from the efficiency of a serverless architecture and microservices can be deployed rapidly in response to changing demands.
nib travel is beginning to realise the business benefits of more uptime and better application performance. The team has moved from monolithic changes to rapid microservice deployments using blue-green deployment methods which has lowered the downtime risk.
Online transactions are down from between two and eight seconds to sub-second response times, which is important for the company’s conversion rate, one of the largest benefits of moving to cloud.
nib travel can now quantify lost sales due to deployment downtime and savings around maintaining on premises hardware, systems operations and security patching.
