Driving Digital Transformation For Financial Services Leader in Record Time

When working with a globally recognized investment management company, our experts provided top-of-the-line security and risk management within a modernized cloud architecture.

Group 1001 is a tech-driven financial services company headquartered in Zionsville, Indiana, that powers the next generation of insurance businesses with useful and intuitive solutions and products accessible to everyone. Founded in 2013, the company has grown to over 1,400 employees and combined assets under management of $65.2 billion, serving more than 950,000 customers. Group 1001’s insurance brands fall under the categories of life and annuity, health, property and casualty and specialty. A few of its brands include: Delaware Life, Gainbridge®, Clear Spring Health, Clear Spring Property and Casualty Group, Clear Spring Life and Annuity Company, and RVI Group, among others.

Over the past decade, Group 1001 has seen significant business and revenue growth and the trajectory is only expected to continue. Yet, their technology was lagging behind in multiple areas and unable to keep pace with the growth they were experiencing. In addition, the company’s critical data was hosted in a third party data center that carried with it significant security, fiscal and operational risks for the organization.

This prompted the need for Group 1001 to seek out CleanSlate’s assistance with a complete digital transformation and cloud migration to support their future growth and achieve the competitive advantage they were looking for.

challenges

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. This put the organization’s remaining technology budget for 2024 and 2025 in jeopardy.

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. While Group 1001 wanted their portfolio companies to be focusing on growth, they couldn’t because the lack of standardized processes led to inefficiencies and duplicated efforts.

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

With slow network performance, it inevitably led to poor portfolio company satisfaction as they could not quickly get the access they needed when they needed it. 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.

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. This stalled the organization’s growth as there was no way to really know key performance indicators or metrics that could help them identify opportunities for growth.

Solutions

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. This modernized infrastructure now allows Group 1001 to adapt to changes faster, which reduces the burden of technical debt across portfolio companies.

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. By centralizing their data in the cloud, Group 1001 is now able to oversee their own application and data infrastructure and ensure compliance and efficiency across portfolio companies. The organization can now respond quickly to incidents, minimizing downtime and improving response times.

Security and Risk Management

Group 1001’s migration to the cloud enabled them to make a clean break from unreliable vendors who had previously exposed them to security risks. CleanSlate helped them implement Monitoring as Code, which provides proactive threat detection and continuous system oversight. This is a huge benefit that enables them 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. This ability to automate everything helps bring governance to standardization and consistency to operations. This is a huge benefit to all the companies under Group 1001’s umbrella. By having standardized processes and architecture across all their portfolio companies, this minimizes the complexity they faced before and reduces redundancies. Through the use of established templates and reusable design patterns, the company can now ensure that all future deployments meet best practices and firm-wide standards.

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. They also utilize automated monitoring and alerting to streamline incident response, which ensures potential issues are addressed proactively. 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.

Results

Optimized

Changes in CPU, Memory or Disk allocation went from 2+ months to overnight

Increased

Efficiency – New server provisioning from 6-8 weeks to 1 hour

Improved

Reduced operating costs by millions with new infrastructure

Group 1001 partnered with CleanSlate to achieve their aggressive goals of migrating their application and data infrastructure from a third party data center to AWS cloud before their contract with their existing vendor expired. CleanSlate expeditiously 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. The project achieved the goals it set out to accomplish and more with the transition being done so seamlessly that it was almost unnoticeable to its stakeholders. 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.

Additionally, the partnership did not end once the migration was complete. Once the “Lift & Shift” migration was finished, CleanSlate immediately transitioned its focus into a “Transform in Place” phase. This helped ensure that the platform could continue to operate without interruption while changes were taking place to ensure the platform was best suited to Group1001’s unique needs.

With a new technology team, renewed focus, and investment in AWS, Group1001 is now well-suited to meet its aggressive growth goals both now and in the future. Additional results include:

Cost Savings

  • Group1001 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

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