Financial Services Leader Modernizes Core Platform and Accelerates Growth Through Seamless AWS Migration

High Infrastructure Costs

Group 1001’s lease with a third party data center was about to expire and an extension proved to be extremely costly and lacking in security provisions. The data center was utilizing multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) circuits that led to high maintenance and operational expenses that were continuing to rise. The high infrastructure costs limited their ability to invest in innovation that could help build efficiency or growth into their business.

Lack of Scalability and Flexibility

Since Group 1001’s existing data infrastructure lacked flexibility, there was difficulty in scaling the infrastructure to accommodate new portfolio companies, which slowed down acquisition integration. This led to legacy bottlenecks in onboarding and resource allocation, which ultimately meant higher costs and a lack of cohesiveness.

Security Risks

Group 1001 experienced multiple instances of ransomware threats and other security threats due to insufficient vendor controls and lack of internal security infrastructure. Their colocated data center also had limited monitoring capabilities, which prevented proactive threat detection and response.

Poor Customer Service

Group 1001’s portfolio companies lacked centralized IT support because the system was disjointed and not able to accommodate the growing demands. Monitoring and incident response times were slow which also fueled the frustrations of the many portfolio companies Group 1001 was trying to serve. This poor centralized services hindered the business from the ability to grow in their customer experience to further enhance the Group1001 value chain.

Insufficient Data Insights

The decentralized data structure across Group 1001’s portfolio companies resulted in virtually no insight into the data that was needed to drive strategic decision-making and risk management. This lack of data knowledge meant that Group 1001 knew very little about its operational and performance needs.

Infrastructure Modernization

CleanSlate partnered with Group 1001 to help migrate their legacy VMware on-premise to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing platform. This transition led to much more data flexibility and resilience from the start, eliminating many of the issues they were facing. By implementing Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and automated pipelines, this reduced the manual effort that was required and made deployments much easier.

Operational Control and Oversight

The move to AWS also included insourcing core functions like NOC, SOC, and service desk operations, which enhanced direct control and reduced security risks associated with external vendors. Group 1001 is now able to oversee their own application and data infrastructure and ensure compliance and efficiency across portfolio companies.

Security and Risk Management

CleanSlate helped Group 1001 implement Monitoring as Code, which provides proactive threat detection and continuous system oversight. This is a huge benefit that enables the company to maintain control of their security operations, which strengthens data protection and reduces their need to depend on external vendors for critical functions.

Standardization

Group 1001 utilizes Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to manage and provision their infrastructure using code instead of manual processes. By having standardized processes and architecture across all Group 1001’s portfolio companies, this minimizes the complexity they faced before and reduces redundancies.

Automation of Key Processes

CleanSlate helped Group 1001 implement CI/CD pipelines, which enable continuous delivery and faster deployment of updates, ensuring that systems are always secure and up-to-date.

CleanSlate successfully achieved Group 1001’s aggressive goal of implementing a new, modern cloud architecture and data migration before their existing data center contract expired.

CleanSlate established a program to “Lift & Shift” their entire application portfolio through AWS’s proprietary technology in less than 100 days. The migration was completed successfully with zero disruption to its customers and trading partners.

By making the choice to partner with CleanSlate and through the use of AWS technology, Group 1001 was able to increase operational efficiencies for its portfolio companies, boost security measures and achieve significant cost savings.

By automating what were once manual, repetitive tasks, Group 1001 can now focus their time and attention on more strategic initiatives that will benefit the organization in the long run. The foundation CleanSlate laid for Group1001 positions them to grow and become more efficient in the following areas:

• Product and Service Development
  • Enhance product and service offering ideation by aggregating and synthesizing unstructured data insights
  • Using AI agents to generate creative options from data
• Marketing, Sales and Distribution
  • Next product to buy recommendations to upsell and cross-sell
  • Automate consumer segmentation at scale to tailor marketing initiatives
  • Generate personalized marketing content from (un)structured data from consumer profiles
  • Collaborate with AI agents to accelerate content development for marketing team
• Pricing and Underwriting
  • Underwriting digital assistant to collect and summarize underwriting materials to compare them to “standard” applications to identify outliers
  • Policy generation for E&S policies based on the collection and generation of risk data to appropriately cover exposure in unregulated markets
• Policy Administration, Claims Management and Customer Support 
  • Claims analysis and fraud detection
  • Claims digital assistant to provide coaching to claims support agents
  • Policyholder concierge for personalized policyholder engagement, self-service and guidance with multi-lingual support
  • Churn prevention and customer sentiment analysis to improve relationship management and support experience
• Investment and Risk Management
  • Investment research by ingesting everything from annual reports to third-party research to aggregate, summarize and more quickly analyze documents
• Actuarial, technology platforms and operations
  • Accelerate modernization and enhancement of technology platforms with DevSecOps assistants
  • Develop individualized training content for employees based on role and competencies
  • Enable self-serve and automate tasks (e.g. draft and review legal documents)
  • Interpret actuarial results

The move to a modernized cloud platform enables Group 1001 to continue the exponential growth they are charting and positions them to lead the competitive insurance market both now and in the future.

Cost Savings

Group 1001 saved millions in operating costs due to:

• Deprecation of high cost MPLS lines and equipment
• High cost, low server outsourcing arrangement
• Colocation costs for servers that were no longer required

Efficiency Gains

• Provisioning time for basic new servers went from 6-8 weeks after approvals to 1 hour via IaC
• Problem detection time went from user calls days after the incident occurred to near real-time for infrastructure managed by new observability plan watched by insourced NOC

Resource Optimization

• Increases or decreases in allocation of CPU, Memory or Disk went from 2+ months to overnight

Platform Modernization

• Accelerate modernization and enhancement of technology platforms with DevSecOps assistants