Australian well being insurer nib’s cloud migration began in 2015. Nevertheless, it wasn’t till 9 years later, in 2024, that it was in a position to full the migration of 100% of on-premise workloads, 95% to Amazon Net Companies and the remaining 5% to different cloud platforms.
nib Chief Data Officer Brendan Mills stated mission prioritisation proved to be a problem, with IT balancing growth-related enterprise tasks alongside the migration. He stated the completed mission positions nib properly for utilizing AI, which is being piloted for quite a lot of use circumstances.
SEE: Evaluating cloud choices? See our comparability of AWS with Google Cloud.
Who’s nib, and why is its cloud migration an enormous deal?
Australia’s nib is a Prime-100 ASX-listed non-public well being insurer. With a bunch income of AUD $1.7 billion final yr (US $1.1 billion), it gives 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 last reporting interval.
Along with being amongst Australia’s largest medical insurance gamers, nib can be:
- An Australian prime three participant and world distributor of journey insurance coverage.
- A number one supplier of medical insurance for worldwide college students and staff in Australia, the place it insures round 200,000 worldwide college students and staff.
- Has an curiosity in Australia’s Nationwide Incapacity Insurance coverage Scheme, the place it has finished a number of acquisitions and helps 40,000 members by way of its nib Thrive enterprise.
- Maintains a majority stake in medtech organisation Midnight Well being, which has supplied entry to healthcare by way of telehealth companies to greater than 160,000 Australians.
- Has a knowledge science and repair three way partnership with Cigna Company referred to as Honeysuckle Well being.
nib’s dimension, footprint and operations in a regulated trade imply its all-in transfer to the cloud is important. The mission wanted to think about key dangers akin to paying insurance coverage in a well timed method to clients, safeguarding buyer information and minimising threat for buyers.
Why did nib determine to maneuver every thing to the cloud?
nib first began to experiment with the cloud in late 2015. Mills stated that, like many massive Australian firms, it began small with a view to accelerating shortly. The enterprise was primarily motivated by the agility that it believed shifting to the cloud might carry.
SEE: Our refresher on some great benefits of cloud computing
The shift to the cloud was not all by design. Via merger and acquisition exercise and progress, together with the operation of a giant journey insurance coverage arm, nib had seven disparate information centres; one among these was nib-owned, whereas the others had been a mixture of co-located information centres.
“We noticed the advantages of a extra targeted funding in know-how that may profit our clients, versus managing information centres and infrastructure,” Mills defined.
Transferring a major insurance coverage system of document to AWS
In 2019, nib migrated its company medical insurance enterprise GU Well being to AWS. This marked a big enhance in its use of cloud companies, and one of many Australian medical insurance trade’s earliest migrations of an insurance coverage system of document to the cloud in Australia.
Via the ultimate levels of the migration, nib has moved different a number of Excessive Inherent Threat techniques. “By transferring these EIR techniques, we’ve additional fortified our know-how spine, making certain that vital operations are operating on superior and resilient platforms,” Mills stated.
Key learnings from nib’s epic cloud migration mission
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 stated the remaining 5% of its workloads are supported by different cloud suppliers and SaaS techniques. These are a number of the learnings from this cloud migration mission.
Select a cloud supplier aligned along with your cloud technique
Mills stated AWS was chosen because the well being insurer’s major cloud associate on the again of its product set, its scale and its robust capacity 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 totally aligned with nib’s strategy. “I’m not suggesting we’ll up our tent and transfer campground, however a few of these functions have been refactored, and we have now some optionality round a few of these.”
Inside prioritisation can place stress on mission timeframes
The most important mission difficulty was the momentum and prioritisation hurdles encountered after the mission began in 2017. Mills admitted that “we might have favored this to occur earlier,” despite the fact that nib was nonetheless taking a really methodical and risk-conscious strategy to the mission.
Mills defined that it’s usually “arduous to get government colleagues enthusiastic about cloud migration” and that cloud and infrastructure was by no means seen as a cause to not help enterprise progress. This meant balancing priorities between different enterprise know-how wants and the migration.
Working with regulators can require important time funding
nib labored intently with APRA to satisfy its stringent cloud adoption requirements and necessities. That is thought of vital for techniques of document, which keep info important for an establishment to find out its obligations to clients and counterparties.
Mills stated nib spent a variety 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 steerage. He stated, whereas he wouldn’t name this difficult, “there was a variety of it.”
SEE: The challenges and advantages of cloud migration
Count on technical challenges as merchandise and functions evolve
There have been some technical features encountered all through the mission; Mills stated this occurred in some circumstances the place a product set had advanced or functions wanted refactoring. Nevertheless, he stated the enterprise went in with “eyes huge 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 have a look at. Mills stated this sees the enterprise sitting down “shoulder to shoulder” with AWS to have a look at cloud spending by way of a finops lens to optimise and guarantee it’s “paying for the best issues.”
What advantages does nib count on after its cloud migration?
Mills stated the finished cloud migration will present nib with an expansive atmosphere that may be dialed-up or down, which can be price environment friendly and permits higher member information analytics.
“The transfer may be very a lot a strategic resolution on many fronts,” he stated.
“We’re assured in regards to the atmosphere; AWS offers us with agility and adaptability, and permits nib to construct functionality in the best way we function our enterprise and comprise prices.”
SEE: The cloud computing future, in accordance with Gartner
AI use circumstances being explored throughout nib’s enterprise
nib expects the cloud to permit it to develop its present use and future exploration of synthetic intelligence. The well being insurer is already experimenting with or deploying use circumstances for generative AI in quite a lot 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, prepare and deploy machine studying fashions, whereas Lex is a managed AI service for constructing conversational interfaces.