Insurer begins its all-digital journey, boosts platform performance with SAP HANA on Azure

A leading insurer with all-digital aspirations

Achmea, a leading insurer based in the Netherlands, is building a cloud strategy that aims to deliver flexibility, scalability, and speed across the business, with less intensive lifecycle management requirements for its IT team. And that means prioritizing innovation.

“For us, standing still is the same as moving backward. We’re always aiming for the latest technologies, without any hesitation,” says Peter LaCroix, Sr. Manager Standard Platforms and Integration at Achmea.

Several of the insurer’s business-critical workloads were hosted on external on-premises infrastructure, including its data warehouse and fraud management applications. The company’s Linux-based infrastructure was powered by an aging SAP HANA appliance that was reaching its end-of-service date. To continue operating on-premises, the Achmea team would have needed to make a major capital expenditure to replace the hardware. And to stay up to date, Achmea would have needed to refresh the whole platform and infrastructure every four years.

But it wasn’t just impending costs that pointed Achmea toward the cloud. With the company’s aim to become the digital insurer for the Netherlands by 2025, continuing with physical hardware didn’t match the company’s overall strategy.

“It’s in our nature to be disruptive,” says LaCroix. “That’s our vision, and that means everything has to be instant. Everything has to be real time. Everything has to be digital.”

Achmea’s on-premises systems were running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, a well-established, successful operating system deployment that the team wanted to continue to use. So, it needed a cloud solution—and a provider—that would work effectively with its existing infrastructure. Achmea opted to move to Microsoft Azure and sought expertise from SUSE, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, for help with the migration.

“It was clear that Microsoft and SUSE have a strong working relationship,” says Sacha Boer, Team Manager for UNIX Platform Operations at Achmea. “Having these two recognized companies closely involved also played a key role in reassuring our management team to give us the go-ahead.”

Rapid migration by an expert team

Using SAP HANA Certified Virtual Machines on Microsoft Azure, Achmea began its transformation by shifting three vital and data-hungry applications into virtual machine–based Linux Enterprise Server instances: its SAP Business Warehouse on HANA, fraud management, and contact center applications. The company had used SAP products for years, so Achmea employees already knew a lot about SAP. But they took the opportunity to work closely with SUSE and Microsoft to scope the full potential of the move.

“We had several sessions with the SUSE and Microsoft experts, who looked into our environment to see what was possible on Azure and helped us to decide our next steps,” says LaCroix. “We have a lot of confidence in our team—and a lot of confidence in Microsoft Azure.”

The process began with a detailed testing and development phase. SUSE and Microsoft helped Achmea test likely failover scenarios, including running extra application servers to determine if the virtual machine–based Linux instances could cope with the volume. The high availability demonstrated in this proof-of-concept was ideal for meeting the service-level agreements that Achmea required for its production environment.

The team completed the initial migration in a single weekend, which included a multi-node SAP Business Warehouse on HANA scale-out deployment on Azure virtual machines using standard SAP tools and the team’s proof-of-concept architecture.

The company’s SAP applications are deployed using SUSE Pacemaker Clusters and SAP HANA System Replication within Azure Availability Zones, which provide high availability and resilience to datacenter failures, with a recovery point objective of zero and near-zero recovery time. With large data volumes hosted both on-premises and in the cloud, Achmea is using Azure ExpressRoute to reduce network latency and Commvault to provide comprehensive data protection for its business-critical SAP applications.

Simple scalability for a cloud-based future

Achmea is already seeing stronger performance for its three business-critical workloads on Azure. The ability to quickly scale is a huge advantage for the team, which often had to spend months on making key infrastructure upgrades. The rapid scalability was effectively demonstrated when the team needed to scale up its fraud management application. “When we had to upgrade a 1-TB machine to a 2-TB machine, we did it in five minutes with Azure,” says LaCroix. “On-premises, it would have taken us months, but now we can deliver new business value almost instantly.”

The team now has five Azure virtual machines running on SUSE Linux for production, plus another five fallback servers in a separate zone, with a majority-maker node in place to keep the production environment the primary system. As its digital transformation continues, Achmea is exploring even more ways to use the combination of SAP running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Azure to provide more efficiency and capability to its users, including running SAP S/4HANA applications on Azure.

Meanwhile, the Achmea team now has the ideal foundation for its next project, a major migration of all its policies into a single cloud-based database. “We’ve used Azure to help us build a reliable, high-performance foundation for the migration work that’s yet to come,” says LaCroix.

Flexible, low-cost experimentation

The testing and development environment that the team built with SUSE and Microsoft is crucial for the ongoing adoption of Azure at Achmea—and it’s easy to provision, too. Not only can developers quickly create a new test environment whenever they need one, but they can also shut it down when they’re done working with it. That means faster creation and iteration to meet new business requirements, lower development costs, and more informed, lower-risk decision making.

“We set out to bring new agility and scalability to our business—and to our IT team,” says LaCroix. “Using Azure, we’ve already come a long way in a short time, and I’m excited to see what more we can achieve as we drive our transformation forward.”