Sapiens transforms the insurance and financial sectors and cuts time to market in half with Azure

A cloud-first approach to insurance

Sapiens takes a cloud-first approach to help accelerate its customers’ digital transformations, offering a comprehensive insurance platform that includes low-code and no-code solutions for maximum efficiency and impact. With Sapiens continuing to expand and support more than 600 insurers across 30 countries, it sought to modernize its platform and product offerings with a targeted focus on consolidation and containerization. “We started with the building blocks that we designed to go with our enterprise-scale landing zone, which can support thousands of customers, and built our hub-and-spoke architecture based on Microsoft best practices,” explains Michael Mirel, Head of Cloud and DevOps Center of Excellence at Sapiens. “All of our management groups, security, and monitoring were put in place before starting to migrate our applications to the cloud.”

For the workloads that migrated to Azure, Sapiens soon shifted from infrastructure as a service (IaaS) virtual machines, integrated with its monitoring and patching stack, to being a heavy consumer of AKS with direct access to the product team and an ability to influence the product roadmap. Adding those clusters to its Azure Arc environment, Sapiens unlocked a multitude of new operational efficiencies, including greater visibility across multiple cloud vendors.

“Running at the scale we do, Azure Arc met all of our requirements for a single pane of glass—we have our patching, monitoring dashboards, and day-to-day management of our security capabilities all implemented in Azure, and we can extend those to other cloud providers,” says Mirel. “Trusting Microsoft, we started examining Azure Arc when it was in preview, and we were the first organization in Israel that started working with Azure Arc–enabled Kubernetes two years ago.”

Sapiens’ default monitoring tool is the Log Analytics workspace in Azure Monitor and Application Insights, all of which provide significant monitoring and management capabilities that aren’t available on-premises. “With Azure Monitor, we can assess the availability of our services and how many calls we’re receiving,” says Mirel. “And the AI capabilities of Azure Monitor Application Insights help us understand our applications’ behaviors and alerts us to any anomalies. If a transaction appears to have taken more time than it should have, we can investigate why and quickly address the issue.”

Reducing time to market and operational costs through automation, and helping ensure regulatory compliance

For scalability and speed in getting to market, Sapiens heavily invested in infrastructure as code and automated its development life cycle, delivery process, and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. “Using and investing in Microsoft Azure tools to automate some of our infrastructure and processes, we managed to cut our time to market in half and reduced our operational overhead by at least 40 percent,” emphasizes Mirel.

Customers that support thousands of deployments and releases in a week, or even a day, need both good automation and strong security safeguards with full transparency. Because insurance is such a regulated sector, Sapiens relies on the Microsoft Security suite, including Azure Firewall and Azure Web Application Firewall, Azure Active Directory (part of Microsoft Entra), in addition to Microsoft Defender for Cloud and its Microsoft Defender for DevOps offering (in public preview). These products support Sapiens in helping ensure cloud security compliance with varying regulations across the world. “We use Microsoft Security solutions like Defender for Cloud to build up our security posture,” explains Mirel. “Based on that, we have ongoing assessments with a Microsoft team to continually find out what we don’t know and improve ourselves, and we share our Microsoft Secure Score with our customers.”

Bringing customers along for the journey with cloud services solutions

Having grown rapidly since its initial cloud migration, most of Sapiens’ production and development workloads now run on Azure. Given its new and ever-evolving cloud services offerings, more of the company’s Azure environment is going to production to host customer tenants and environments. “Our focus is on our ongoing cloud modernization project, but we’re also migrating customers from their datacenters to our cloud, taking a ‘lift and shift’ approach,” says Mirel. “We’re improving their resiliency, availability, and security and integrating them with our digital suites and business intelligence platforms to provide the best solutions as part of our Sapiens cloud services umbrella.”

Sapiens ultimately takes a two-pronged approach with Azure. On one hand, it relies on Azure to deliver business-critical services to its customers, but in turn, its customers use Sapiens and Azure together to make an impact within their organizations. This seamless interoperability has not only led Sapiens to expand its Azure usage further, but it’s also moved Sapiens to refer to its Microsoft team, including cloud solution architects and FastTrack for Azure specialists, as “family.” The teams work closely together to further enhance Sapiens’ core platform and its security, helping ensure better support for customer requirements.

“What we’re trying to achieve is that our customers can focus on their business growth while we manage all of their critical operations,” says Mirel. “Because we’re committed to delivering resiliency, availability, data recovery, and everything else, they don’t need to worry about infrastructure, DevOps, licensing, and security.”

“A full-blown solution that’s exactly what we need”

Reflecting back on where it started, Sapiens has seen great improvements using Azure to reduce downtime, increase agility, future-proof the organization, and provide better service to both its engineers and customers. “Our main goal at the outset was to be up to date with our technology stack,” recalls Mirel. “In the beginning, it was IaaS. We quickly realized that microservices are where we need to be in terms of products, so we started this journey with Azure and continued to improve our delivery model to be very agile and fast.”

Remarkably, Sapiens’ close relationship with Microsoft and its product teams has also influenced the products themselves. As a result, the company felt confident it was getting what it wanted based on its specific business needs and technology stack. For example, when Sapiens wanted to connect its Azure environments to those of its customers, it worked with Microsoft to adapt Private Link to its business model. “We’re dealing with the biggest insurance companies in the world that are taking our software as a service, but we also need to interoperate with the existing ecosystems of these companies,” Mirel explains. “Thanks to Azure Private Link, we can connect cloud to cloud in a single click, which reduced deployment efforts by 50 percent.”

Planning for the future, Sapiens recently established a Cloud Center of Excellence, headed by Mirel, to fully embrace a transformative mindset throughout its daily operations. “We want to break down the walls and provide more self-service to our users and better service to our customers as a result,” says Mirel. “If I’m an end-user, developer, tester, or product manager, I should be able to spin up another test environment and release during the night instead of being dependent on DevOps or IT and having to wait several days.”

Sapiens continues to lean on automation, knowledge transfer, and an overall shift in mindset to further expand its offerings and give more to its customers. Says Mirel, “Now more than ever, we’re happy to have Microsoft as our default collaborator and Azure as our default cloud platform because we can offer a full-blown solution that’s exactly what we need.”

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