South African Insurer embraces AWS Cloud for enhanced security and scalability

The business challenge

One of South Africa's top short-term insurers is looking to replace their on-premise Oracle Super Cluster environment, on hardware which is no longer supported. A decision had to be made to renew the legacy hardware or migrate to a cloud solution.

In addition, one of the data systems — a legacy SAS application — was vital for calculating certain risks but had significant licensing costs.

If the insurer decided to move to the cloud, all key business data workloads would have to be moved off Oracle onto the new data environment.

The solution

The insurer made the call to replace the Oracle environment with Databricks on AWS. However, with many projects on the go, the organisation did not have enough resourcing capacity in-house to deliver this project in the tight timelines required.
 
The client contacted a number of consulting houses and decided on Altron to help them deliver their Oracle Supercluster and SAS legacy replacement solution.  Altron provided experienced AWS architects, Databricks and SAS engineers who delivered the scope to agreed timeframes and costs.
 
The team analysed existing priority workloads in Oracle and SAS and refactored those into Databricks on AWS before running in parallel and subsequently decommissioning the legacy workloads.

 
The results

The migration project started in 2023 and has re-developed a significant number of ingestion workloads into Databricks, enabling the client to switch off many of the legacy Oracle and SAS streams.  In addition to the workload migration, the Altron resources have become central in the process of creating a new Data Operation in Databricks - Data DevOps.

The Head of the client’s Data Foundation and Delivery team said, “Altron have been instrumental in deploying our Data Operation establishment to AWS, through their ability to deliver highly skilled and motivated resources that meet current and future needs”.