Suncorp delivers reliable financial services with a multicloud approach

Australian financial services provider Suncorp Group sought to replace its on-premise datacenter infrastructure with a multicloud approach to meet ever-changing customer demand with digital services. By adopting Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS and Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift, jointly managed container platforms from Red Hat and hyperscale public cloud partners, Suncorp can support higher demand for digital claim services. Standardizing on Red Hat OpenShift has also helped Suncorp scale to its choice of cloud solutions to support unique workload and security needs. Now, rather than complex management tasks, the financial services provider can focus on offering new, innovative services that meet ever-evolving customer needs. 

Benefits:

• Improved scalability to support increased demand for digital services
• Optimized application performance with multicloud approach to meet unique workload needs
• Reduced management burden, including faster procurement
• Improved platform security and regulatory compliance

Suncorp, one of Australia’s leading financial service providers, has prioritized the delivery of personalized, digital-first customer experiences. To stay competitive in the price-sensitive insurance market, Suncorp must quickly build and launch these experiences to its customers—while maintaining strict compliance with security and regulatory requirements.

Its customer pricing engine helps Suncorp’s contact center teams communicate effectively about policy premiums and risk to current and potential customers. This tool ensures Suncorp prices products competitively and in line with its risk appetite. To support increasing demand for digital interactions from customers through its pricing engine and other business applications, Suncorp sought to replace its existing on-premise infrastructure with a reliable, multicloud development platform that could speed development of new applications and scale at lower cost. 

“Our mission to bring almost all applications and services to the cloud is crucial to ensuring our insurance and banking businesses continue to deliver amazing customer experiences,” said Pizzato.

 Building on decades-long success with Red Hat platform technologies, Suncorp’s IT Infrastructure team decided to adopt jointly managed and supported by Red Hat and hyperscale partners: Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift. These platforms combine the massive scalability of AWS and Azure public clouds with enterprise Kubernetes container technology to support developer productivity, application stability, and robust security as demands evolve.

To expand the security capabilities built into these platforms, Suncorp also adopted Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes, a Kubernetes-native approach that supports built-in security across the entire software development life cycle of cloud-native applications.

“We are big supporters of open source software,” said Charles Pizzato, Executive General Manager, IT Infrastructure, Suncorp Group. “Red Hat OpenShift delivers the benefits of powerful Kubernetes technology wrapped in enterprise services. This combination kickstart the software development lifecycle with standardized, secure containers, ultimately reducing time to value.”

Suncorp’s developers and security teams worked closely with Red Hat Consulting during and after deployment to apply best practices for the service provider’s new technology.

"Red Hat’s consulting services team helped us minimize the time to value from these critical new platforms while maximizing the value we could achieve,” said Pizzato. “It’s been a true collaboration that has delivered great results."

Improved scalability to support digital claim growth

Over the last decade, Suncorp has seen a significant increase in online claims. During natural disasters, such as flooding or bushfires, Suncorp’s customers often can only access information and services through mobile devices—and the overall volume of claims rapidly increases during these times. Access to Azure and AWS public cloud resources helps Suncorp quickly scale system capacity to accommodate changes in demand more easily than with its previous traditional, on-premise datacenter approach.

“Each claim has specific nuances, but our goal is always to respond quickly to get our customers the guidance and help they need,” said Pizzato. “Part of providing that rapid response is making sure our systems stay available, even in the face of higher demand. With OpenShift Service on AWS and Azure Red Hat OpenShift, we can build and deploy applications that are essentially infinitely scalable.”

Optimized application performance with multicloud approach

Through a multicloud approach, Suncorp’s developers can use Red Hat OpenShift to create an application once, then deploy or move to the optimal cloud service—whether AWS, Azure, or a different solution—based on performance needs, geographical location, and security and compliance requirements.

“Despite having the option to deploy to different clouds, we’ve seen less platform sprawl and lower development costs,” said Pizzato. “Having a choice of clouds also helps us achieve the best possible performance for both back-end and customer-facing systems and applications.”

Reduced management burden to speed development 

By standardizing on Red Hat OpenShift, administrative tasks— such as purchasing hardware, installing operating systems and platforms, and performing security hardening—that are not eliminated by the shift to a cloud-based approach are faster. For example, procurement of new infrastructure and platforms now takes hours, rather than weeks or months.

“The entire development and deployment process is vastly simpler now,” said Pizzato. “We can deliver new solutions to the business and our customers faster than ever.”