PURE Insurance successfully transforms its customer and agent systems by migrating to AWS

The obstacles they faced

From its early days, PURE Insurance recognized the potential of cloud technologies and promptly devised a technology strategy to leverage them. Due to legal requirements that require strict control over proprietary assets and data, the insurer made a deliberate choice to host core platforms either internally or within a private cloud. This approach allowed PURE Insurance to address its compliance requirements while still benefitting from the latest cloud advancements.

"As the cloud matured, we saw an opportunity for geographic redundancy and better pricing options for data storage, which motivated us to move from an on-premises environment," said Howard Muhlstein, VP of Infrastructure Services at PURE Insurance.

PURE Insurance made a strategic decision to migrate the core of its business—its flagship policy system—to Amazon Web Services (AWS). As with many insurance companies, maintaining pace with technological advancements and compliance standards often requires frequent upgrades to their technology and systems. These insurance systems can be complex and expensive, with client policy administration, claims handling and account transactions demanding not only robust technology but also comprehensive training. To handle the magnitude of its operations, PURE Insurance employs a sizable IT team of approximately 100 personnel.

The PURE Online system is utilized extensively both internally for quoting and binding new business and externally by thousands of broker partners within the insurance industry. This system serves as a crucial data hub, enabling the generation of downstream metrics, dashboards and interfacing with other systems for claims administration and member-facing portals.

The PURE Online tool has established high levels of reliability. Any potential instability or outage could have significant repercussions. Without this central portal's stability, customers would face hurdles in making policy requests, processing claims or receiving quotes. Similarly, customer service representatives and other personnel would lose the ability to access and manage customer account information or provide assistance.

What we achieved together

Now that it’s running on AWS, PURE Insurance has integrated several developer tools into its DevOps stack, including CodeCommit, CodeBuild and CodeDeploy. In addition, PURE Insurance implemented a serverless stack with AWS components such as API Gateway, Lambda functions and dynamic DB instances. With its flagship application on AWS, PURE Insurance has opened up numerous possibilities for growth and expansion through the diverse services AWS offers.

The migration led to significant improvements in performance, including the establishment of a performance monitoring and measurement framework. It also increased visibility and reduced response times. Notably, PURE Insurance realized substantial improvements in automating processes, reducing its database automation time on AWS from a range of 24–48 hours to just 25 minutes.

Muhlstein praised the Rackspace team, stating, "They supported our IT transformation by completing the requirements design and proof of concepts before implementation. Their quick responses and expert insights established trust. It was a fantastic experience overall."

Trust played a pivotal role in this IT transformation. Rackspace cultivated this trust by working closely with the team and providing immediate feedback on design considerations. Muhlstein also highlighted a memorable moment, "leveraging the cloud-native offering of AWS to solve log-capture issues," which created excitement and drew people toward the project's success.

The migration to the AWS platform has the potential to profoundly enhance the user experience for thousands of PURE Online's business-to-business relationships. Improved performance, quicker response times and shorter software release times mean immediate increased availability for users. PURE Insurance's internal development teams can now shift focus from addressing performance issues to adding new functionalities.

Durakci expressed satisfaction with Rackspace, saying, "Their responsiveness, accurate answers and support—despite time zone differences—have been fantastic. They always listen to us and provide the right advice."

What does this mean for the user experience? "Without a doubt, the user experience is improved," explained Muhlstein. "The application performs quickly, allowing users to be more efficient. From the end user's perspective, the core system remains unchanged, but it's performing exceptionally well and is highly stable."

Looking to the future, PURE Insurance hopes to capitalize on the success of the migration and is considering several workloads for AWS, including its Claims Administration System. "We're interested in moving some of our integration orchestration workloads from a partner to AWS. Lambda and API Gateway also have the potential for us to deliver new functionality," Muhlstein said.