Hexure cuts processing time by up to 97.2% with Azure SQL Managed Instance

Life insurance and annuities help see families through difficult times and protect people in retirement. To help customers choose the best insurance and financial vehicles, providers strive to tailor their recommendations to customers’ specific needs and behaviors—and deliver those recommendations faster than their competitors. Hexure’s innovative FireLight sales platform enables providers to meet this moment. It helps them gather and process relevant information from prospects to deliver a better customer experience. In addition, the platform empowers business growth through an accelerated and compliant end-to-end sales process.

Hexure created FireLight to streamline the way insurance carriers and distributors interact with customers. The sales platform helped the industry replace paper forms, complex tables, and spreadsheets with user-friendly e-application and order entry capabilities, an intuitive quoting solution, a centralized carrier forms engine, and customizable e-delivery workflows. It provides Hexure customers with end-to-end support for insurance and annuities sales processes—from product selection and policy quotes to underwriting, client onboarding, and post-sale services.

Reaching an inflection point

Hexure FireLight’s success in the industry brought with it some challenges. “We were constantly looking at adding more space,” explains Hexure Senior Cloud Engineer Troy Brovold. “And these were physical machines, so that means ordering more drives. And with so many different replicas of the database to support always-on availability groups, it wasn’t simply buying one new drive. It would actually be four new drives we’d have to purchase and physically install.”

Those space limitations also led to Hexure reducing the number of backups held on its servers, necessitating a complicated, hours-to-day-long process to restore from backups stored on the datacenter vault.

With its infrastructure under pressure, Hexure had a growing imperative to quickly onboard new customers and provision new instances. Migrating to the cloud emerged as the fastest, most cost-effective solution to ensure a secure, compliant, and scalable FireLight platform. But because the sales platform stores and processes the personal data and personal health information (PHI) of its clients’ customers, robust security and compliance capabilities were essential.

Hexure’s CTO and CEO at the time were quite familiar with the performance and cost optimization that migration and modernization bring, having done migration projects at other companies. They understood that moving FireLight to the cloud was the best way forward. Likewise, Hexure’s current CTO, Warren Perlman, who arrived at the company shortly after the migration was complete, also sees the rationale and value of moving to a cloud-based environment. “If you’re not modernizing, you’re falling behind,” he explains. “The goal when we migrated was to modernize by getting off on-premises, which sets us up to scale much more efficiently.”

Making the leap

With leadership fully on board, Hexure initiated the migration of its Windows Server and SQL Server environment to Microsoft Azure SQL Managed Instance to gain the scalability, flexibility, and advanced security that a cloud solution offers. Working closely with its consultants and the SQL engineering team at Microsoft, the Hexure team designed the database to be optimized for their unique use cases, including cross-database querying. At the same time, they conducted extensive testing to make sure critical performance metrics were achieved. All the intensive design, review, and testing that the group performed confirmed that Azure SQL Managed Instance was the right choice for FireLight. Using Azure App Service, Hexure modernized its existing app. As a result, the FireLight team could lift it into the cloud and simplify application management and scaling with a fully managed platform as a service (PaaS), moving forward.

With Azure SQL Managed Instance, organizations can migrate a large number of apps from an on-premises environment to a cloud environment with as low a migration effort as possible. For Hexure, the move to Azure SQL Managed Instance was a seamless effort.

“Literally over a weekend, we rewrote the migration scripts to back up all 1,200-plus databases on-premises, wrote them to a storage account and restored directly to Azure SQL Managed Instance, and had FireLight fully functional,” says Brovold.

After a period of testing and training, Azure SQL Managed Instance became the backbone of the FireLight platform. Now Hexure can easily automate essential cross-database querying and promote changes through different environments, from development to production.

Safeguarding business continuity

With nearly 100% feature parity with on-premises SQL Server, Azure SQL Managed Instance made it easy for Hexure’s IT team to move to a fully managed, highly scalable cloud database solution. PaaS capabilities built into Azure SQL Managed Instance, including point-in-time restore for backups, failover groups for disaster recovery between regions, and linked servers for easier and more secure data movement between instances, allow the team to focus on database administration and optimization. Microsoft handles backups, plus patching and updating SQL and operating system code, removing the burden of infrastructure management. Just as important, the move to Azure SQL Managed Instance eliminated all constraints related to disk space and server capacity. Now IT can provision new instances quickly with faster management operations in Azure SQL Managed Instance and onboard new customers within a day—something that wasn’t possible with the on-premises infrastructure.

With easily managed point-in-time restore, failover groups, and replicas, IT has no concerns around business continuity and disaster recovery issues. “It literally took two mouse clicks to set up a secondary replica,” Brovold says. “Where previously it could take as long as a day to restore from a backup, we can now pick any day over the last 30 days, and if I want to restore to 5:43 PM on the eighth of the month, it’s done.”

Upleveling security and efficiency

Azure SQL Managed Instance gives Hexure a robust security framework that delivers enterprise-grade isolation and compliance by operating within a native Azure virtual network. It enables highly secure, seamless connectivity to on-premises systems without exposing data to the public internet.

“A major benefit of Azure SQL Managed Instance is being able to manage cybersecurity and protection of the data, using Azure Key Vault,“ Perlman says. “I like that the team can use the skills gained with on-premises SQL Server, but in a more secure way in the cloud. Knowing that we can protect our data—even from Microsoft itself—is of real importance to anybody who’s going to be working with personal data.”

The migration to Azure SQL Managed Instance streamlines operations for Hexure’s IT team, reducing the need for dedicated database administrator roles for backup, restore, updates, and patching while freeing up resources for other tasks. Where restoring client records previously took as long as 12 to 24 hours because backups had to be requested from the datacenter, the process is now completed in under 30 minutes. And where onboarding new clients used to take approximately 2 hours, now it’s completed in less than 20 minutes. The significant reduction in processing time is also enabling faster shipping cycles for features and platform improvements.

The following diagram shows data flow in Hexure’s cloud environment, using Azure App Service and Azure SQL Managed Instance across different regions, and a security approach with firewalls and load balancers, Azure Storage for redundancy, and a failover setup for high availability and replication.

A new route to growth and innovation

The benefits that Hexure gained by moving to Azure SQL Managed Instance have been transformational, with IT continuing to innovate. The company was among the first to experience the Azure SQL Managed Instance Next-Gen General Purpose service tier in public preview. Through close collaboration with the Microsoft SQL engineering team, Hexure has been able to adopt new architectures like the Next-Gen GP tier, which delivers increased database capacity and cost efficiency.

“The newer version now holds hundreds of databases on a single managed instance, enabling us to consolidate significantly,” says Brovold. “Our test environments went from five instances each down to one, and our production environments were also reduced.” These changes translated into measurable gains: Hexure cut processing time by up to 97.2% and data migration time by 83%.

Hexure FireLight platform’s successful move to Azure SQL Managed Instance has convinced the company to move all its platforms to Azure infrastructure. Looking ahead, Hexure plans to extend the kind of performance and efficiency gains seen in FireLight by migrating all its platforms to Azure SQL Managed Instance.

Once all Hexure’s platforms are on Azure SQL Managed Instance, the company is poised to explore AI features like the new vector data type to turbocharge its customer experiences. Perlman concludes, “Knowing that we have a reliable and highly secure database platform positions us to think about how we can use AI in ways that will benefit our customers and their customers most. With Azure SQL Managed Instance in place, we’re very well equipped to continue in our role as a leader in insurance tech.”