How Partners Life transformed its cloud adoption and governance with the Minimum Viable Cloud framework

Giants of the cloud have consumerised once complex business IT. But it’s one thing to spin up a virtual server and another to smoothly migrate, launch, and run critical applications in the cloud. As more businesses embrace public cloud platforms, governance models for operating frameworks and deployment methodologies are proving to be as valuable as the technology itself.

Partners Life is blazing a trail in New Zealand’s hyper-competitive insurance sector, amassing the fourth biggest paid-up life book in the industry.

Free from legacy technology issues and distractions associated with merger and acquisition integration, the insurer has flourished on the back of a cloud-first approach to drive continued development of its innovative suite of electronic tools, including adviser sales tool EVINCE and electronic application and underwriting tool MUM.

Organic cloud adoption traps the unwary

Using the Microsoft Azure cloud platform to develop and launch the lion’s share of its core applications, Partners Life is familiar with the ins and outs of scalable cloud services and how they support new operating models.

However, organic adoption of Azure, while providing affordable and easily accessed IT capacity, came at a cost.

Without minimum entry criteria or enterprise guardrails to enforce practices used by its software vendors, the insurer’s Azure platform was becoming difficult to manage. The absent controls obscured a view to costs, complicated security, and stifled the insurer’s agile development model.

Minimum Viable Cloud (MVC) sets stage for new order in cloud

Looking to establish a cloud operating framework to take things forward, Partners Life engaged CCL’s cloud transformation services business unit, Leaven, to codify delivery and management processes for applications and foundation infrastructure in Azure, using pipeline-driven continuous deployment.

Delivered as Minimum Viable Cloud (MVC) framework, Leaven’s approach applies templates and orchestration facilitated by Azure DevOps to automate the deployment of an Azure environment with auditable source control to maintain consistency.

The move established a security-hardened and policy-enforced Azure platform, prescribing operating standards and governance for infrastructure supporting the insurer’s core applications.