RSA completes huge mainframe migration project

Insurer successfully moves 2,000 applications to new Scandinavian data centre

Insurer RSA has completed a large migration project, moving its mainframe hosting 2,000 applications to a new data centre in Scandinavia.

This is a major step in its ongoing digital transformation project, part of a 7-year partnership it signed with Wipro at the start of the year.

The migration was completed over the first weekend in July, bringing to the end one of the most complex and risky parts of the overall programme.

"The risk to the business was significant," RSA group CIO Darren Price (pictured) told Computing. "We were moving infrastructure and changing data centre providers, so there was a high risk to the business, especially if we got it wrong. Timing-wise it went across our mid-year results, and end of quarter, and there would have been a huge financial impact of missing dates."

Price explained that the project was delivered as a joint effort between the business and technology sides of the organisation, with overall group and regional alignment. In other words, every side of the organisation was affected.

"Key resources were brought in to help us," he added. "We had internal recruits to build the core service management capability, and went to the contract market to get transformation expertise. We had clear governance, alignment of the execution plans, and a real focus on QA [Quality Assurance], with in-depth planning."

The trickiest phase of the programme was three months ago, when commercial exit agreements were being negotiated with the group's previous data centre providers, IBM in the UK and Ireland, and CSC in Scandinavia.

"It was commercially challenging," said Price. "We had to agree deals with the current incumbents around access to the data centres and building new infrastructure."

But, he added, IBM and CSC were easy to work with, and helped make the process as smooth as possible.

"As we've worked through it, IBM and CSC have stepped up to support a quality transition of service to Wipro. After the commercial wranglings, they've really stepped up, and that doesn't happen in lots of examples. That was a hell of a relief, because it was the biggest risk."

Having hit the scheduled date for the mainframe migration, the overall transformation project continues throughout the rest of 2016, and the risks to the business continue, Price explained.

"We're migrating mid-range infrastructure services until end of year, including mid-range servers, development and QA. The risk there is high too as Scandinavia goes on holiday now."

RSA is also currently recruiting a new Chief Digital Officer, and expect to make an announcement shortly.