Cloud at the heart of Aviva's plans to become 'the digital-first insurer'

Aviva director of global IT Mark Hall tells AWS Enterprise Summit how the company has big plans for cloud

Cloud infrastructure is "absolutely at the heart" of Aviva's business strategy to become a "digital-first insurer" as it seeks to speed development and cut costs.

That's what Mark Hall, director of global IT operations at Aviva, told the audience at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Enterprise Summit in London today. The conference took place shortly after AWS announced plans to open a new Amazon cloud data centre in the UK.

"Cloud is absolutely at the heart of our business strategy. Key to this is building an ecosystem of suppliers and partners to work with. Our experience with AWS has been nothing short of excellent and a hugely refreshing change," he explained, describing how the benefits seen with the initial cloud rollouts will result in Aviva pushing more of its infrastructure into the cloud.

"It's made our first steps to cloud easy, but more importantly, it's proven the case. And with the foundations now in place, we expect to accelerate and underpin the journey that we're on to become the digital insurer," Hall said.

Aviva, which traces its history back to 1696 and has over 34 million customers across the globe, wants to "be able to respond to the new generation" with a "digital-first experience", said Hall, and cloud has allowed the insurance firm to start to evolve in this way.

After initially satisfying itself over the usual questions concerning cloud - such as how to implement it and is it safe - Aviva took the decision to jump right in.

"We really made the decision and said, let's do this. This isn't a question of should we, this is a question about necessity, we must do this," said Hall.

"But equally we wanted to be cautious about doing this in the right way, not getting bundled up in the hype."

That led to Aviva going through "a big exploration phase" which eventually saw the company select AWS as its cloud provider. Aviva built its first cloud application in January 2015 and expects to have completed 200 cloud developments and deployments by the end of the year.

"We've consciously started small, then we gathered momentum," said Hall, who described how taking small steps means the IT team was able to demonstrate the benefits of cloud infrastructure to the board.

"So when I stood in front of our chief executive and the board and said I think this is the right thing to do, it wasn't a case of ‘are you sure?' it was a case of ‘here's the evidence'."

There were challenges on the way. Hall pointed out how "hype" around cloud needs to be treated with scepticism so it doesn't "become the answer to all the problems in the organisation" and a cultural change was necessary in development, but the overall impact for Aviva has been beneficial, especially around cost.

"We've now got 70 applications and 140 direct development environments [in the cloud]; our costs are projected to be 30-to-50 per cent cheaper on those environments," Hall told the audience, describing how the benefits have influenced plans in the different areas of Aviva.

"Our CIOs in each of our businesses are getting ready to scale from January. The board has agreed to invest a significant sum in enabling this and moving it forward," he said.

For Hall, the best example of how moving to a hosted cloud service has benefited the business concerns a financial reporting system.

"This system does huge amounts of data management modelling. How did we run it in the old days? We had a really big server in a data centre that never got used apart from peaks," he explained.

"We've now transferred this to AWS; we scale up quickly, then we scale down, we run a load of models, do the compute and then we scale back down to steady state," Hall said.

"In terms of the benefits, it's 20 per cent quicker in terms of running it. It's 50 per cent cheaper; we've saved £1.5m, and if I'm honest, it wasn't that hard," he concluded.

However, not every IT leader is so positive about moving to the big cloud providers; head of technology and change delivery at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, Rocco Labellarte, recently told Computing that connecting the service to Microsoft Azure is "tricky" and requires new skills.