Customer Story
AAA Life Insurance drives innovation by integrating mission-critical IBM i data into its AWS environment
$500+
million in annual revenue
1.5 million
active policies
500+
employees
The cloud modernization imperative
Remaining competitive requires keeping up with market expectations in terms of both products and services offered and, increasingly, the speed and flexibility with which they are delivered. So, it is no wonder that businesses globally are adopting advanced analytics solutions and moving IT operations to the cloud at a blistering pace.
Insurers like AAA Life Insurance are no exception. With over 1.5M active policies, customers have relied on AAA Life to help provide financial protection for decades for those they care about.
The company understood that modernizing every aspect of its business operations, especially core IT systems, was key to providing the innovative applications and services expected by its consumers, partners, and internal team members.
Business Challenge
Like many insurers, AAA Life relies on enterprise-scale IBM computing systems for its core processing.
The company’s core insurance policy management system, Life Plus, runs on the IBM i platform. While this platform is renowned for its computational speed, power, and reliability— its unique data storage, software, and hardware architecture make it highly challenging to migrate data to modern cloudbased data systems and make that data consumable.
So, AAA Life had to develop a strategic IT modernization plan that would encompass its mission-critical LifePlus data, provide a practical, near-term pathway to the cloud, and support its future business requirements.
Industry
Insurance
Challenges
- Policy processing and customer analytics hindered by reliance on multiple disparate computing platforms and applications
- Cloud modernization initiative required extensive integration of existing applications and data flows
- Dependent upon core business applications and data on IBM i servers and storage systems
Solution
Solution
AAA Life chose to partner with AWS for its cloud modernization journey and centered its solution on the Amazon Redshift data warehouse powered by scalable Amazon S3 repositories. With this technology base, AAA Life would be able to realize the myriad of speed, scale, and cost benefits that come from using the AWS infrastructure and roll out advanced analytics and reporting applications based on more unified and accessible datasets.
To meet the challenge of integrating the company’s LifePlus data, AAA Life chose to work with Precisely, an AWS and IBM partner with a rich heritage in providing reliable, high-performance data integration solutions for both IBM mainframe and IBM i systems.
AAA Life implemented Change Data Capture (CDC) using Precisely Connect to integrate its IBM i data efficiently and securely from its LifePlus system into the AWS environment in real-time and at scale. Using Connect, the IBM i DB2 data lands in the newly established Amazon PostgreSQL environment. From there, Amazon DMS is used to replicate the data to its rapidly expanding Redshift environment, where the business can readily utilize it for analytical and operational processes. All this without the need for specialized IBM skills.
The proven Precisely solution provides native support for leading streaming platforms and enables companies to build real-time data pipelines that integrate data from multiple enterprise sources in a single workflow.
Key IT Systems
-
- IBM i servers
- Majesco LifePlus
- AWS solutions including:
• Amazon Redshift
• Amazon Postgres
• Amazon S3
• Amazon DMS
- Merkel
- Verisk Analytics FAST
Results
With Precisely Connect, AAA Life’s mission-critical IBM i LifePlus data is now available for analytical and operational purposes in the company’s AWS environment in real-time. While the former on-premises process AAA Life relied on contributed to incomplete data being used to make decisions about their risks, Precisely Connect enables AAA Life to innovate and deliver new functionality and greater insight to the business, while extending the value of its IBM i investments.
As the company continues its cloud modernization journey and migrates its LifePlus policy management system to Merkel and FAST applications running in Amazon cloud leveraging Amazon RDS PostreSQL, Amazon DMS and Amazon Redshift, Connect’s “design once, deploy anywhere” capabilities will stand AAA Life in good stead. Data transformation models and workflows that AAA Life implements today will easily adapt and work seamlessly with whatever new or modified target environments or data use cases it requires in the future.
From a risk and security standpoint, moving to cloud requires encryption capabilities that ensure the secure movement of data. Connect CDC met AAA Life’s encryption requirements, thus eliminating this risk and powering the business and analytics team with real-time data. This seamless, real-time data replication process also improved efficiencies on the side of AAA Life.
Even when the company’s IBM i systems have been fully migrated to modern cloud-based apps, Precisely Connect will enable AAA Life to access the vast volumes of historical business and customer data residing quickly and easily in the LifePlus system, enabling them to innovate and drive competitive advantage, while still being able to obtain insight from its rich legacy data stores.
Precisely Connect
Integrate data seamlessly from legacy systems into next-gen cloud and data platforms with one solution.