Insurance – Easing IT Infrastructure with Virtualization and Server Maintenance

Client Information

The client is a leading data analytics service provider for the insurance, financial, and energy sectors. With over 45 years of industry expertise, the client has delivered efficient data analytics and related support to organizations across 29 countries. The client has earned a wide reputation as one of the world’s most innovative companies and has received many global-level awards and certifications for its contribution to the industry.

Client Requirements

The client sought full-fledged IT infrastructure support involving effective server maintenance, configuration and application maintenance, infrastructure automation, troubleshooting, 24/7 production and monitoring support, among other things. The project is all about effective IT infrastructure support involving virtualization, on-premises servers, and DevOps tools.

Challenges

1) Cyclic Server Patching and Maintenance Scheduling

One of the major challenges was the need for regular patching of physical and virtual servers, which followed a strict 90-day cycle. Coordinating maintenance windows with multiple application teams and stakeholders was complex, requiring meticulous planning to avoid disrupting critical business operations.

2) Limited Automation in the Patching Process

The client’s infrastructure had limited automation tools, particularly for managing server patching through Puppet. This resulted in inefficiencies, as the lack of automated workflows slowed down the patching process and increased the risk of errors during manual updates.

3) Network and Server Reboot Issues

Network issues and server reboots caused intermittent disruptions, particularly during peak operational hours. These incidents affected the stability of both physical and virtual servers, challenging seamless infrastructure support and 24/7 uptime.

4) Disaster Recovery and Data Migration Complexities

A significant challenge was to ensure a robust disaster recovery (DR) plan and execute data migration to AWS without data loss. The process required careful planning, testing, and coordination to ensure that the client’s critical services, including predictive analytics and fraud prevention, remained unaffected during transitions.

Solutions

1) Efficient Server Patching and Maintenance Coordination

Veritis addressed the patching challenge by implementing a well-organized schedule that aligned maintenance windows with the client’s business teams. Veritis ensured that patching was completed with minimal disruption to the client’s global operations by establishing clear communication with application stakeholders and creating a cyclic maintenance calendar.

2) Automation through Puppet and DevOps Tools

To resolve the inefficiencies in patching, Veritis introduced automation tools and improved the Puppet-based workflows. Veritis significantly reduced the time and manual effort required for server patching and configuration by enhancing Puppet’s automation capabilities and streamlining the infrastructure management process.

3) Proactive Monitoring and Troubleshooting

Veritis implemented a robust monitoring and troubleshooting framework to address network issues and prevent unplanned server reboots. This involved continuous performance monitoring of both virtual and physical servers and quick OS-level troubleshooting. The round-the-clock support helped maintain server stability, ensuring uninterrupted service for the client.

4) Disaster Recovery and AWS Migration Strategy

Veritis developed and implemented a comprehensive Disaster Recovery plan, which included replicating data across data centers and migrating to AWS. The team carefully planned and executed the migration process, ensuring no data loss and business continuity. This solution provided the client with enhanced infrastructure resilience and cloud scalability.

Veritis Approach

For almost a year, i.e., from around June 26, 2017, Veritis has supported the client with all the end-to-end IT infrastructure services.

In line with the project requirement to serve global customers in insurance, natural resources, financial services, government, and risk management areas, Veritis’ team of technical experts offered all the needed infrastructure support to the clients through effective server maintenance and round-the-clock production and monitoring support, while also supporting them in data migration and disaster recovery avoiding data loss and easing customer-level support.

Involving Linux-based systems, VMWare solutions, and Vcenter servers, the Veritis technical team, comprising two infrastructure support personnel and DevOps teams, worked on around 600 servers, including 100 virtual and 500 physical servers across all stages. Tasks involved configuring, spinning, and load balancing, OS-based troubleshooting, monitoring the staging process, automating infrastructure, and database maintenance, among others.

Veritis’ unique offerings to the client were the Disaster Recovery plan and implementation of migration to AWS.

Value Delivered

Overall, Veritis provided the client with all the needed infrastructure support, helping it seamlessly deliver its key service areas, such as predictive analytics and decision-support solutions related to fraud prevention, actuarial science, insurance coverages, fire protection, catastrophe and weather risk, data management, and other fields, through proprietary data sets and industry expertise.

Key deliverables include:

• Effective server maintenance like Patching (both on-premises and cloud servers) and keeping them up-to-date
• Configuration and application maintenance
• Automation in configuration and whole infrastructure. Configure the infrastructure for the API manager (which includes the WSO2 API Manager and WSO2 Identity Server together in the environment.
• Production and monitoring of the systems of business clients
• Generation and implementation of the SSL/TLS 2.1 Certificates on web servers, URLs, etc.
• 24/7 production and monitoring support
• Troubleshooting the OS-level issues
• Services related to replicating things from an existing data center to another for Disaster Recovery.