Insurance titan AIA embraces a cloud-based future to boost cost savings, sustainability while improving customer experience for millions

Multiple markets take first steps to Azure

AIA’s markets operate somewhat independently, each with a different set of requirements, products, and strategies. The company promotes dispersed innovation but maintains centralized guidance for certain elements like security, data compliance, and sustainability goals. “We’re an enterprise with a startup mentality, balancing structured and rigorous technology implementation with freedom,” says Marcel Malan, Head of Group IT Operations and General Manager at AIA. “We try to find ways to creatively solve business problems rather than mandate solutions.”

In late 2018, AIA began its cloud-first transformation, choosing Microsoft Azure for its long-term, large-scale infrastructure modernization. The company’s combined IT environments were immense and its on-premises deployments complex. AIA was consistently growing about 30 percent a year from an infrastructure and compute perspective, but cloud applications represented less than 5 percent of the company’s total compute workload—the rest was on-premises. Vikas Bhandari, Director of Group Engineering and Delivery for Cloud and Infrastructure at AIA, lays out the issues, saying, “Close to half the world’s population lives in our markets. We needed to be able to easily scale and provide services across all these regions and markets. Our shift to the Microsoft Cloud helps us achieve this objective.”

Regulatory requirements spur migration and innovation

AIA made its initial move to Azure in response to IFRS 17, an updated regulatory and reporting standard for insurance companies and part of the International Financial Reporting Standards. To comply with the new standard, AIA needed to deploy updated applications and manage a much higher volume of data to meet reporting requirements.

Says Malan, “It’s a new way of reporting on financial metrics, which required a massive change in how we work with countries and their data, and it was much richer data. We’d have needed to implement additional datacenters just to manage the compute.”

Expanding its Azure footprint

The positive experience with IFRS 17 led AIA to choose the Microsoft Cloud for its company-wide migration. “After our IFRS 17 success, it made sense to start moving all our other applications to Azure as well,” states Bhandari. The company wanted reliability, scalability, coherence, and simplicity. According to Malan, the directory services, collaboration platform, and datacenter connectivity that Microsoft offers all played a key role in AIA’s decision, as did the fact that the company has its IFRS 17 integration estate on Azure. Umeshi de Fonseka, Chief Technology Officer of AIA Sri Lanka, says, “We use Microsoft 365 extensively, we’ve deployed Microsoft Teams at scale, and we built security tied in to Azure. Expanding our Microsoft relationship was a natural next step.” 

AIA’s individual markets orientation enabled an exceptionally fast transition for such a large company. AIA set an ambitious goal of using public cloud resources to conduct 90 percent of its computing, company-wide. “I’m proud to say we’re already at more than 80 percent now, primarily on Azure,” says Malan. “With the industry benchmark at around 20 to 24 percent, we’re far ahead of our peers.”

Spread across 18 markets, AIA has a variety of infrastructure, software, and deployment timelines, so it uses a broad range of Azure solutions and capabilities, from the expected to the experimental. Its enterprise service bus (ESB) solution, which is core for the entire company, works on Linux on Azure. “I’m happy to say we haven’t had any downtime with our ESB solution—our operations have gone uninterrupted since we deployed,” says de Fonseka, adding, “The performance with Linux on Azure was better than it was on-premises.”

Transforming through technology, digital services, and analytics

AIA aims to transform through three distinct pillars: technology, digital services, and analytics (TDA). Bhandari describes the company’s TDA strategy as, “Providing the foundational technologies, modernizing our infrastructure core, meeting customer expectations, and using AI and analytics as much as possible to really delight the customer.” For Malan, adopting the Microsoft Cloud helps him to achieve key TDA goals, including eliminating legacy infrastructure hardware and adhering to what he calls an “always-on promise” of achieving site availability metrics that meet the banking and financial world’s rigorous standards.

As part of this effort, the company has added AI, virtualization, massively scalable storage, and other advanced capabilities by deploying Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Data Lake Storage, and Azure Data Factory. “The center of gravity has moved toward containers,” Bhandari states. “For us, containers tend to run on Linux, but we have both Linux and Windows virtual machines on Azure.” AIA developers now create cloud-native applications using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and clusters, with a goal of orchestrating and managing container resources from a single control plane. Malan adds, “Currently, we’re working on more than 100 data analytics use cases that will help the business across multiple domains. We’re putting a very high value on how that can drive AIA’s future.”

AIA reaps the benefits of an Azure migration

AIA’s ongoing infrastructure evolution has resulted in many gains for the company. “We’ve taken the time to use cloud-native technologies wherever possible,” says de Fonseka. “And so far it has worked out well for us. We’ve realized a cost savings benefit of more than 20 percent compared to our previous on-premises setup as of now.” Despite tightening resources and increasing economic pressure across economies, AIA is now able to efficiently accomplish much more with its existing investments and technology environments.

IT staff rely on the Azure platform’s flexible scaling capabilities. “We had a scenario where we needed to boost compute by 10 times for just a weekend. Using Azure, we dynamically scaled up and back down with zero business interruption. It was seamless,” recalls Malan. “And with our IFRS 17 update, we now process 1.2 billion transactional reports a month, which is up four or five times.”

The company’s modernization efforts with the Microsoft Cloud are also yielding improvements in straight-through processing, which means frictionless, zero-touch turnaround for customers. Customer engagement through digital channels has grown substantially, with more than 73 percent of claims and service requests submitted digitally in 2021. AIA has achieved other impressive metrics, such as processing 60 percent of all customer transactions with no direct employee intervention and issuing more than 95 percent of all new policies electronically.

AIA has other enhancements underway to improve the customer experience. AIA is developing a Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment built on Azure that its agents will use to dramatically improve customer service. “In our call center, agents must switch between six to eight screens when serving a customer,” de Fonseka explains. “With applications like Dynamics 365 Customer Service, we can consolidate all this into one instance, giving the agent a 360-degree view of the customer and the ability to help them faster and better.”

AIA’s cloud migration is also vital for the company’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) efforts and its ongoing commitment to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. ”Our on-premises datacenter carbon footprint is reduced significantly by our move to Azure,” says de Fonseka. “And by using Azure Logic Apps, we’ve managed to save money on printing by automating workflows.” Bill Nguyen, Chief Strategy and Digital Transformation Officer for AIA Vietnam, adds, “ESG is a focus for everyone. It’s a key driver for lessening risk management in terms of infrastructure and making sure the technology is up to date, and the service that Microsoft provides is the best.”

A leap in efficiency with Red Hat on Azure

AIA enabled Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure. As a result, AIA has reduced its time to market, cutting provisioning times from more than 90 days to about an hour. Its IT teams now take advantage of a self-service model to create development environments and quickly drive results.

The company recognizes cloud-related impacts for its physical infrastructure as well. “We’re seeing significant benefits in terms of agility,” notes Bhandari. “One of our markets reported that now with the Microsoft Cloud, its lead time for setting up a new office went from about 90 days down to just a week. That’s a significant improvement.”

Establishing a combined core with security and data compliance

Malan points to the advantages of having interoperable security solutions at the company’s disposal. AIA blends specialized internal tools deployed in an Azure environment with products like Microsoft Intune, to manage employees’ devices, and Azure data classification tools. Malan also points to Azure DDoS Protection as a confidence-building motivation for AIA, saying, “Microsoft has averted some of the biggest DDoS attacks in history. So, we really have a fusion of AIA and Microsoft bringing cybersecurity to the fore. We get the best of both worlds, where we use our industry-based practices and augment them with Microsoft security solutions. I also highly value Azure data management and certification. It’s the most comprehensive in terms of data and regulatory compliance. Given the amount of personal data we manage, this is critical.”

Into the future with AI and AIA

AIA’s cloud journey doesn’t end once it reaches its 90 percent goal. Indeed, that’s where the real innovation will begin, as the company starts employing Azure AI solutions as it hurtles toward a future driven by advanced computing. AIA has already made great progress. The company has delivered more than 100 major projects that use AI and analytics, enhancing multiple domains of the business, including recruitment, training, underwriting, and claims handling.

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