About Sara Assicurazioni
Sara Assicurazioni is a leading Italian insurance company offering automobile, home, health, protection, accident, savings, investment, security, and property insurance products nationally. Serving the consumer market, small to medium enterprises, professionals, and traders, Sara Assicurazioni is a highly valued brand across various industries.
Founded in 1946 as an insurance company, Risks Automotive, Sara Assicurazioni is the official insurer of the Automobile Club d’Italia. As well as serving the Motor TPL class, the Company also operates in the life and fund management sector.
Based in Rome, Italy, Sara Assicurazioni has more than 600 dedicated employees. As of 2017, the Company’s revenue reached over EUR 500 Million.
Case Study Snapshot
- Established a multicloud enabled network with Megaport, using flexible, scalable, and on-demand connectivity to move their mission-critical transactional workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
- Created a multi-region network architecture across key locations in Europe.
- Achieved a resilient and secure network, for their workloads, towards AWS today and GCP in the near future.
Challenges
Sara Assicurazioni faced challenges with core business workloads – predominately made up of HTTP/HTTPS web traffic for transactional and Point of Sale processes – which traversed the Sara corporate network to the private cloud infrastructure, run by a third party. The Company’s existing network provider did not give them the service flexibility they needed when they started the transition to public cloud.
It was possible to add resources to their existing private network through a service request process, however, removing resources resulted in high costs. With a typical waiting time of two weeks or more for changes to their services, Sara Assicurazioni was finding it difficult to justify the delays and needed a quicker and more streamlined system.
With next-generation technologies becoming increasingly more prevalent in today’s enterprise business processes, Machine Learning and human-computer interaction applications can provide a layer of intelligence to a company’s operations and can enable a competitive advantage in the market. The move to public cloud was accelerated because Sara Assicurazioni wanted to use these additional services but their existing private cloud provider could not offer them.
Solution
Sara Assicurazioni established a multicloud enabled network with Megaport, using flexible, scalable, and on-demand connectivity to move their mission-critical transactional workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
- The Company established a ‘last mile’ connection to a Megaport-enabled data centre in London and also to a Megaport-enabled data centre in Frankfurt – from their Rome data centre.
- From the London and Frankfurt data centres, multiple Virtual Cross Connects (VXCs) were provisioned into AWS Dublin and AWS Frankfurt. Future VXCs will be provisioned to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Frankfurt, and GCP Amsterdam locations.
- Sara Assicurazioni not only established a complete multicloud architecture from two interconnection points but also achieved a resilient and secure network, for their workloads, towards AWS today and GCP in the near future.
Sara Assicurazioni multicloud network diagram leveraging Megaport
“Megaport: Our stairway to the cloud.”
Paolo Perrucci, Director of IT Infrastructure, Sara Assicurazioni
Benefits
- Cloud access to their chosen services across a private network resulting in reliable, secure, and low-latency workload migration.
- Flexible, on-demand, and scalable connections to all the cloud services they needed – and they were able to provision their network in just a few minutes.
- The ability to easily and near instantly add and remove services, to suit business needs, within the Megaport self-serve Portal negating the need to wait for a provider to make changes for them.
- The ability to scale up connectivity in line with their application development timelines and requirements to any public cloud provider in any required region.
- The ability to use new innovative technology options as they become available from public cloud providers such as Machine Learning and human-computer interaction applications.
Future Plans
- Adopting a multicloud strategy meant Sara Assicurazioni could execute workloads on the AWS IaaS platform. In the next phase of operations, the Company will move their ERP solution from their on-premise facility to GCP.
- Sara Assicurazioni is now enjoying the benefits of a multicloud strategy and have plans to consume the industry’s best public cloud services and resources available to help drive their business forward.