Delphi Financial Case Study

Project: AWS Footprint

Company: Delphi Financial

Industry: Insurance

About Delphi Financial

Delphi Financial Group is a financial holding company focused on specialty insurance and insurance-related service businesses in North America. They are a members of the Tokio Marine Group, Japan’s largest non-life insurer and one of the world’s top-tier global insurance groups. Their strategy is to operate and grow market leading companies in profitable niche markets with their subsidiary companies maintaining core franchises in the group employee benefits insurance market as well as in the asset accumulation market.

As a member company to Tokio Marine Group, Delphi initiated the migration project in response to a corporate initiatives to migrate all computing platforms to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the first quarter of 2020. The primary goals of migrating to AWS were to obtain a better computing platform for their applications and users, while also reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their legacy computing platforms.

Challenges

After some initial introductory meetings and cost evaluations, the project was put on hold due to community shutdowns that were initiated to try to help stop the spread of the Covid-19 virus in the United States.

With shutdowns in full scale, the Delphi IT team was presented with a brand new problem as their entire workforce was remote, but no remote workforce infrastructure presently available to them. The solution? Eplexity and Delphi - with the help of AWS - would provide a rapid acceleration and adoption of the AWS platform.

Challenge 1

Obtain a better computing system.

Challenge 2

Decrease total cost of ownership.

Challenge 3

Covid -19 hit and Delphi had no remote workforce structure.

Solutions

What kicked off as a migration project, quickly evolved into a rapid response to mobilize the Delphi workforce for remote work due to the novel Covid-19 virus spreading globally. As many companies experienced the widespread adoption of a remote workforce, the ability to support through IT varied significantly and left many searching for solutions in the cloud to provide their workforce a cost-effective and reliable solution to meet the new demands. It was with this in mind that Eplexity and Delphi hit the pause button on their migration to address the Critical Priority. Soliciting the help of AWS, Eplexity and Delphi engaged in a POC with respect to their AWS Workspaces offering. With many workers across the Delphi profile utilizing 10+ year old hardware, the POC would utilize a mix of Power and PowerPro bundles to evaluate the most appropriate solution for the vast majority of the workforce. After many reported that they workstations actually ran faster through AWS Workspaces than they did locally, it was determined that the Delphi workforce would have the ability to work remotely...and arguably better than they had previous to the shutdown.

With the remote work solution handled and supported by Eplexity's CXOS Mission Control, it was now time to shift back to the migration effort for the Delphi environment. Employing methods of Replatform for the Domain Controllers, and Rehost for the remainder of the application groups, Eplexity and Delphi would spend the next weeks actively migrating and testing workloads newly minted in the AWS Cloud by transportation of AWS CloudEndure and management through the AWS Migration Hub. After completing the migration over the course of five weeks, Delphi had now found a new home both their physical work presence, and their virtual work presence.

Solution 1

POC was engaged which resulted in faster workstations.

Solution 2

CXOS managed the remote workforce simultaneously of the migration project.

Solution 3

Migrated to AWS within 5 weeks.

Results

While challenging times abounded during the COVID-19 pandemic, one thing was for certain, the ability to establish a remote workforce through the rapid adoption of virtual environments in the AWS Cloud would not present additional challenge. The power of CXOS Landing Zone to accelerate adoption, and the robust support of the 24/7 CXOS Mission Control to achieve their goals of enabling a remote work force and establish IT infrastructure in the AWS Cloud. The result was a rapid adoption of 38 users into AWS Workspaces and the migration of 11 servers over the course of six weeks with an estimated 40% monthly savings over their existing environment.

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