Streamlining Cloud Migration for a Leading Insurance Company

How EPAM Partnered with a Major Insurance Provider on its Modernization Journey, Delivering Enhanced Reliability and Scalability with Amazon Web Services

At a glance

STRATEGIC PARTNER

SERVICE

Cloud

INDUSTRY

Insurance

When a leading insurance company needed to modernize its aging infrastructure in the UK, it turned to EPAM for a seamless migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS). EPAM expertly guided the provider throughout its modernization journey — from securing AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) funding to conducting discovery and completing a successful migration. Additionally, we collaborated to automate CI/CD pipelines, implement enhanced testing capabilities and develop a new token translation service to optimize identity management. With the modern cloud infrastructure in place, the insurance giant now has the reliability and scalability it needs for the future.

A MODERNIZATION STORY

Effective Migration Requires Velocity with Quality

To continue providing exceptional service to its global customers, a leading insurer knew it needed a modern cloud infrastructure for enhanced reliability and scalability. In 2024, the company needed to move away from its existing on-premises environment in the UK as it was becoming increasingly expensive and difficult to manage. To begin the modernization journey, the insurance leader turned to its longstanding partner EPAM for help in migrating to AWS. EPAM, an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, supported the insurer throughout the multi-year process.

Once the company knew it wanted to migrate to AWS, EPAM worked with the team to apply for MAP funding — securing almost 70% of the migration cost. From there, EPAM conducted discovery, assessing the complexities and dependencies of the migration. We knew that attempting too many complex changes during migration might lead to failure, so we recommended a pilot, incremental migration to begin. During the pilot, we established reusable migration processes and embraced an agile approach and modern engineering best practices. This allowed us to minimize complexities, keep momentum with minimal downtime and develop a repeatable process for a smooth transition when fully scaled.

Through our tight collaboration, we leveraged the expertise of our teams to deliver a successful cloud migration that optimized business value. Additionally, as part of the migration, we identified several opportunities for improvement: automating CI/CD processes, implementing enhanced testing capabilities and developing a token translation service for enhanced security.

FASTER DEPLOYMENT, FEWER ERRORS

Automating CI/CD Pipelines

The migration to AWS provided an opportunity to overhaul legacy pipelines and automate them for the cloud. EPAM implemented new CI/CD pipelines that utilize a shared library to promote DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principles across the codebase. This centralized library allows all repositories to leverage pre-built functionality for building, testing, scanning and deploying without needing custom configuration. The CI/CD pipeline emphasizes quality, security, metrics gathering and code promotion workflows to manage testing and deployments. Top priority is given to security testing, while unit and integration testing ensure code integrity before production deployment. The new automated pipelines accelerate the delivery and promotion of applications into production, enabling faster migrations.

Further, EPAM implemented enhanced testing capabilities directly into the CI/CD pipelines, enabling rapid feedback on changes during development. This approach ensures a high level of confidence in the quality of each microservice migration, even before additional manual QA testing takes place. This framework provides a solid foundation for the insurer to build upon as the company continues to expand its capabilities. Utilizing automated testing within the pipelines significantly reduced the risk of downtime and outages caused by manual errors, helping avoid costly disruptions to their operations.

NEW SECURITY REQUIREMENTS

Streamlining Authentication

The cloud migration brought new identity and security requirements for the insurance leader. As such, we worked together to develop a token translation service that provided a quick and effective solution without risking the migration timeline. Instead of rewriting hundreds of services to comply with new protocols, this service acts as an intermediary for existing microservices to use their current authentication tokens while translating them for cloud use. Not only did this solution save time and costs, but it preserves functionality and enhances security by centralizing token management. This illustrates a strategic solution of how we partnered with our client to adapt to evolving identity challenges in cloud environments, setting a benchmark for future transformations.

RESULTS