MetLife securely speeds up customer product releases using Azure DevOps

The insurance industry today faces challenges including changing customer expectations, regulatory pressures, technological innovations, and environmental risks. As insurers work to move from a reactive to a more proactive posture, they are using data analytics to better anticipate and prevent loss while engaging customers with more personalized products and services. 

A global leader across insurance, annuities, employee benefits, and asset management, MetLife is dedicated to changing how its customers experience insurance by making it simpler, smarter, and designed around them. To deliver on these customer-focused goals, MetLife development teams began investing in best practice improvements to its software development cycles.   

“Part of my role is to drive technology transformation to change the way technology resources work, deliver, and deploy solutions,” saysSiew Choo Soh, Asia CIO at MetLife. “This also involves ensuring that development teams are up to date with the latest and best DevOps practices and tools to ensure that only high quality and secure code is deployed into production for the various app landscapes that we have.”

Enhancing security, efficiency, and quality throughout Asia 

MetLife serves millions of individual and institutional insurance customers across Australia, Bangladesh, China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, South Korea, and Vietnam. MetLife’s Asia developers set out to implement regional industry best practices for its development security operations (DevSecOps). Their goal was clear: to enhance the security, efficiency, and quality of their software development cycle.

However, the developers were met with initial challenges they did not anticipate. The teams were still using manual test processes. The subsequent uploading of each build could take up to eight hours to complete, with error detection often happening after deployment was finished. This inefficiency was a significant drawback in an industry that demands agility and precision. 

Turning to a trusted platform

Because the MetLife dev teams were using Microsoft Azure as its trusted core platform, dev teams expanded on Azure DevOps to standardize build pipelines for continuous integration and deployments (CI/CD). Azure DevOps is a tool that accelerates the building, testing, and deployment of applications by bringing the development and operations teams together for smooth and seamless software delivery.

Prior to Azure, the growing size and number of applications made scaling while optimizing a challenge for the MetLife teams. To get ahead of these scaling issues, they wanted to align all teams onto a reference standard that would enable high levels of developer productivity and a more secure way of deploying applications to the production environments. Azure DevOps provided the MetLife teams with a suite of tools that revolutionized their approach. 

The flexibility of Azure Boards enabled the teams to track work comprehensively and improve project management. Custom add-ons from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace helped the teams maximize the use of the tool for many uses including sprint planning, where teams come together to plan out the steps to delivering a new product. Azure Repos offered secure, scalable Git repositories for managing the source code. Azure Pipelines automated the build and deployment processes, significantly reducing manual labor and error rates and helping set branch policies. With Azure Pipelines, the developers now incorporate security scans and code quality checks, which speeds up the process lifecycle. Pipelines also deployed their application to the target environment. The new process took fewer than six months to implement, with teams taking advantage of these tools to provide end-to-end traceability. 

Using best practices to overcome obstacles 

MetLife’s Asia development teams mainly develop Java and ReactJS mobile applications that center around customer care, such as policy registration, profile updates, policy inquiries, and even claim submissions. MetLife’s award-winning apps also support health-related, value-added services such as scheduling a doctor’s appointment and even making video calls directly with a doctor. 

Teams across the region collaborated using a test-and-learn approach and partnered with Microsoft engineers to overcome obstacles and incorporate best DevSecOps practices into its CI/CD value stream. MetLife organized training—Dojo and bootcamps sessions—to ensure that the enablement of the teams was done in the most systematic and scalable manner. They worked with Microsoft partner Aware Group and engaged MetLife’s engineering leads to create the best-in-class lifecycle along with the quality thresholds. The Asia development teams’ aim was to automate and integrate these quality models into the pipelines as much as possible to ensure a seamless implementation of the desired standards. 

Transforming DevOps

Azure DevOps has changed MetLife’s Asia development operations in dramatic ways. Since rolling out the new platform, completion times for automated tests and builds have been reduced from just under eight hours to under an hour in many cases. Regularly scheduled scans improve code quality and support security, ensuring that any vulnerabilities are addressed promptly. These scans also save approximately 15 minutes per build per developer and help detect errors earlier. MetLife’s Asia developers believe they can catch up to 15 percent more errors by integrating these best practices earlier in the development process. The ability to rapidly deploy changes and new features has significantly improved MetLife’s responsiveness to market changes and customer needs. This agility is critical in the competitive insurance market.

"By continually improving our release process, we’re able to better protect customer information,” remarks Soh. “We are a company entrusted with the data of millions of customers worldwide, so protecting information is our most important job. We can deliver outstanding experiences by reducing the time between releasing new products and features to our customers without compromising security or quality. Microsoft Azure DevOps has helped our business practices become more robust."