Business opportunity
Insurance companies in Italy have a mandatory membership in the government organization Associazione Nazionale Imprese Assicuratrici (ANIA). Through ANIA’s digital platform, members determine premiums, manage and arbitrate claims, assist law enforcement in fraud investigations, and participate in research relevant to the industry and the public.
Giancarlo Vismara, Head of Infrastructure and Cybersecurity, explains that his strategic goal is to modernize data services and applications so that ANIA members can develop more personalized experiences for their customers.
Technical challenge
The company’s main obstacle to adopting cloud is ANIA’s mainframe and its core COBOL systems along with traditional applications built as monoliths and hosted on VMware virtual machines.
As a first step, while the team refactors applications from COBOL to Java for cloud-native operations, ANIA decided to lift-and-shift its VMware workloads to the cloud. This would provide an initial proof of concept for operating in the cloud while also increasing the resilience of critical systems when deployed in a cloud provider’s multizone region (MZR). Since ANIA’s members rely on the VMware-hosted applications for all daily business, the team would need to avoid service interruptions during the transition.
Since ANIA’s members rely on the VMware-hosted applications for all daily business, the team would need to avoid service interruptions during the transition.
Our solution
Together, ANIA and Kyndryl migrated 40 VMware servers running mission-critical services to Google Cloud (GCP) in just 6 months.
Working with its partners at Google, Kyndryl developed infrastructure-as-code scripts in Terraform to provision the GCVE landscape and simplify future infrastructure management with the eventual scope of cloud operations already in mind.
Kyndryl transitioned ANIA from on-premises primary and backup centers to a four-site strategy (dual on-premises, dual on-cloud) for resilient operations.
The Power of Partnership
Kyndryl consulted Google GCVE experts to achieve the hybrid integration. With combined expertise, the team was able to deploy core business applications on Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) so they can interact with mainframe services on premises in the same Milan region without significant latency.
We couldn’t have done the migration without Kyndryl.
What progress looks like
Kyndryl executed the cloud migration of ANIA's VMware landscape on schedule and with minimal disruption to association members.
- GCVE migration tools ensured a smooth, low-risk transition to a hybrid infrastructure in 6 months.
- Increased the reliability of key member-facing services with deployment in a GCVE multizone region (MZR).
- Implemented infrastructure-as-code with scripts customized for easy modification as the cloud migration evolves, positioning ANIA to incrementally deliver new data services to members.