Zavarovalnica Triglav goes all in on Microsoft Fabric as the data platform for the AI era

Zavarovalnica Triglav was founded in 1900, a publicly traded insurance-financial group based in Slovenia. It excels in both life and non-life insurance, reinsurance, and asset management, holding dominant market positions in Slovenia and the wider Adriatic region. Zavarovalnica Triglav is setting out an ambitious plan for 2025–2030, focused on expanding its market, improving operations and financial performance, and strengthening sustainability—all supported by a solid credit rating. Digital transformation underpins the future growth that Zavarovalnica Triglav is trying to achieve.

Triglav’s digital transformation focuses on delivering seamless client experiences anytime, anywhere by leveraging modern technologies. This approach enhances customer interactions while streamlining internal processes, reducing costs, and improving operational efficiency. To deliver client delight and improve business operations, the company is laser focused on getting the “data story” right.

Triglav has been facing challenges typical of large, regulated enterprises, including fragmented reporting systems across finance, operations, and actuarial teams, manual data preparation and reconciliation processes, and limited scalability and performance in legacy BI tools. Coupled with increasing demand for unified, auditable, and secure analytics, these issues highlighted the need for a consolidated analytics platform capable of supporting structured reporting and future expansion. It was clear that Triglav needed to re-imagine their data estate and modernize to realize their vision. The goal was to align analytics with internal governance and compliance requirements, reduce operational overhead caused by siloed data systems, enable cross-departmental reporting with consistent logic and definitions, and prepare for future integration of AI and advanced analytics. Through a competitive commercial process, Cloud Services was selected to help Triglav achieve these goals.

Unifying and standardizing data for the era of AI

Cloud Services is a trusted data transformation partner with a strong regional presence, deep Microsoft technology expertise, and a proven record of delivering complex BI, analytics, and AI solutions. The company has fifteen years of experience helping clients with data transformation. Based on the data challenges Triglav has been facing, Cloud Services completed a thorough assessment and recommended Microsoft Fabric as the data platform, helping to unify data silos while adhering to security and governance standards and, most importantly, enabling AI and advanced analytics to deliver on Triglav’s strategic imperatives.

Triglav chose Microsoft Fabric for unified Lakehouse architecture with built-in governance and security; Fabric Data Factory to help ingest, mirror, and transform data from array of data sources; seamless integration with Power BI and the Microsoft 365 ecosystem; scalable performance of Fabric Spark for large datasets and complex logic; availability of Fabric Real-Time Intelligence to enable near real-time decisions; and strong partner support from Cloud Services and Microsoft product teams.

By adopting Microsoft Fabric, Triglav transformed its analytics landscape by consolidating siloed data sources—including DB2, SQL, Excel, API, and Synapse—into a unified Fabric Lakehouse architecture. The upgrade involved restructuring the company’s largest and most complex data warehouse, with over 50,000 objects in Azure Synapse shifting from transactional systems to PySpark-based lakehouses, leveraging massive parallel processing for scalability and performance. Finance and operational reports were migrated to Power BI, ensuring shared logic and consistent definitions across departments. Automated data pipelines perform incremental loading and seamlessly mirror data from on-premises sources to SQL database in Microsoft Fabric, significantly reducing manual effort.

This modern, secure, and scalable platform replaced fragmented, legacy systems and introduced advanced capabilities built on Microsoft Fabric components—including OneLake for unified storage, Fabric Spark for distributed processing, Dataflow Gen2 for data transformation, and Real-Time Intelligence for data monitoring and automations.

Building on a platform for success

Cloud Services helped Triglav adopt Microsoft Fabric, delivering significant business and operational impact. The company successfully consolidated its entire data estate into a unified analytics layer, streamlining development and simplifying data integration. Key finance and operational reports were migrated to Fabric with improved performance, maintainability, and consistency. Both manual reconciliation and report preparation were drastically reduced, while enhanced governance and auditability strengthened compliance across reporting layers. Triglav also re-created its most complex data warehouse on the Fabric Lakehouse architecture, leveraging scalable processing for future growth.

The outcomes are measurable and substantial:

• Processing time for critical ETL workloads was reduced on average from 8–9 hours to under 2–3 hours

• Average processing time for migrated transformations to Fabric Spark improved by nearly 15X

• At least 25–30% reduction in overall data platform spend

• With Fabric native ingestion, Triglav was able to completely deprecate two legacy data ingestions

“The unification of data and processing in a single platform is a game changer for us. Data ingestion has become incredibly simple using Data Factory and mirroring capabilities. Managing data orchestration using PySpark proved to be very efficient with help of parallel processing of data,” says Alen Blazic, Lead Data Engineer at Zavarovalnica Triglav.

Looking forward

In parallel with the migration of the remaining data transformation flows to Microsoft Fabric, Triglav is advancing its real-time analytics capabilities. The team is leveraging the customer’s QDi to stream data into Eventhouse and EventStream using KQL, enabling both traditional and real-time analytics, as well as real-time operational optimization and alerting. Eventhouse serves as the bronze layer, harnessing the power of the KQL engine for flexible data processing. Additionally, Triglav is investing in Data Agents to deliver added value directly to business users, further empowering the organization with timely insights and automation.

Discover more about Zavarovalnica Triglav on Facebook, LinkedIn, and X/Twitter.