Hastings Direct migrates Guidewire and other applications to Azure VMware Solution, increasing performance by 1.6 times

Hastings Direct is an insurance company that presents 500,000 quotes a day to roughly 4 million customers for home and vehicle insurance. The company undertook an initiative to transition to a cloud-first, modern workplace and win more business. To improve its market share and deliver better, faster customer journeys, the company moved its workloads to Microsoft Azure VMware Solution. The company migrated one of its core applications, Guidewire, from their on-premises data center to run on Azure VMware Solution. By migrating Guidewire and their entire data center to Azure, Hastings Direct can take advantage of the scale, resilience, and innovation benefits that come with a modern infrastructure. Hastings Direct increased performance by 1.6 times and now handles adjustments 4 and 5 times faster. It has seen a continual reduction in major incidents and positioned itself to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities and innovation opportunities.

“It’s incredible to be executing key processes four and five times faster now. We haven’t changed any code—this is purely Azure VMware Solution performance.”

Simon Bullers, Chief Technology Officer, Hastings Direct

A phased transformation

In the insurance industry, the difference between providing business-winning quotes and losing a customer often comes down to seconds. Most business for car insurers in the United Kingdom comes from price comparison website aggregators that provide insurance rates in a highly commoditized and competitive manner. Business is driven by fluctuating prices, and insurers have razor-thin windows of time in which to respond and close.

Hastings Direct understands this well. It presents 500,000 quotes a day for home, vehicle, and multiple-vehicle insurance to roughly 4 million customers. The company has the goal of becoming the United Kingdom’s largest insurer and a strategy to get there. Hastings Direct migrated its workloads to Microsoft Azure VMware Solution to improve its market share and deliver better, faster customer journeys for the best possible customer quotes.

Like many insurance and financial services companies, Hastings Direct had long hosted its workloads via traditional colocation datacenters and in its own datacenters. The company’s phased transformation—launched in response to its colocation datacenters reaching end of life—included a culture change to a team of teams approach, a new colleague workplace experience, a datacenter migration, a contact center migration, a data enrichment journey, and the deployment of data analytics and AI solutions.

Although technology played a key role in the company’s approach, so did enabling its people. Simon Bullers, Chief Technology Officer at Hastings Direct, recalls, “We knew transformation wouldn’t work without our people onboard. It isn’t just about the cloud, we had to build the culture, set the vision, and train our colleagues. Changing the way our colleagues worked was just as important as changing our technology.” As one of the largest employers in its community, Hastings Direct felt a duty to empower its current employees to drive its cloud-first modernized workplace, rather than hiring from elsewhere.

The other secret to the company’s transformational success lies in its commitment to make the most of Microsoft as an end-to-end technology partner. “The power of the entire engine of Microsoft came together to help deliver this outcome,” Bullers says. “Our transformation has worked so well because every piece of our journey has leveraged the Microsoft ecosystem. When you ask Microsoft to get engaged, you can make real progress.”

No cloud left behind

Because one of its core applications—insurance industry stalwart Guidewire—had a multicast networking feature, Hastings Direct needed a cloud solution capable of handling that functionality. It found its answer in Azure VMware Solution. “We adopted Azure VMware Solution so that we could bring a legacy application into the cloud and take advantage of the scale, resilience, and innovation benefits that come with a modern infrastructure,” says Bullers. “Azure VMware Solution is the hidden gem inside the Microsoft ecosystem. Instead of moving to IaaS [infrastructure as a service], you can migrate a VMware workload as is, and that’s the golden ticket for anyone struggling with their migration.” By moving its workloads to Azure VMware Solution and running on Windows Server, the company could also get extended support and security updates for its older workloads.

Hastings Direct migrated its entire core insurance company platform, including pricing, its insurance policy record (the core book of record), its claims center, and its Guidewire-based billing center, to run exclusively on Azure VMware Solution. For its database, Hastings Direct needed a whopping 120,000 input/output (I/O) operations per second, which necessitated the invention of a new SQL product—one with the largest I/O operations at that time. “We needed the fastest database Microsoft had ever built, so we built it,” says Bullers. “It’s a great example of how Hastings Direct and Microsoft came together to solve a problem.” Hastings Direct runs this database as a middle-tier SQL Server environment on Azure infrastructure as a service, which provides the compute size and performance needed for its databases.

The company uses a host of other Microsoft solutions to propel its business forward, including:

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to run its customer journeys.
Azure Front Door to manage cloud content delivery for the customer journey experiences.
Azure API Management to connect its back-end systems with mobile applications.
Microsoft 365 E5, such as using Power BI to assist with data analysis and visualizations.
Microsoft-managed Surface devices, supported by Azure Virtual Desktop, for each Hastings Direct colleague.
Azure Cosmos DB to support Azure-native deployments.
Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to help secure the company’s environments.
Azure Site Recovery for multiple zones in UK South, the region where Hastings Direct operates, and UK West.

Bullers attributes the company’s ability to get to the cloud so quickly, easily, and effectively to its adoption of Azure VMware Solution. “We wouldn’t have been able to move our business without Azure VMware Solution,” says Bullers. “I don’t think enough companies realize that they can use it to take a legacy environment and bring it directly to the cloud. So, they’re missing out on the benefits of a move to Azure.”

Astoundingly fast and assuredly future-ready

By moving a core colocation platform to Azure VMware Solution, Hastings Direct has seen a significant decline in the number of daily incidents requiring investigation. Bullers states, “We had 753 major incidents in 2021. After our migration to Azure VMware Solution, we dropped by 90 percent to just 75 for all of 2022, and we’re seeing that trend continue in 2023 with the stability of Azure.”

Hastings Direct has achieved some impressive performance jumps as well, greatly enhancing its response times to customer policy adjustments. Since the migration, Hastings Direct colleagues can now execute a midterm adjustment four times faster than they could before. And if a customer requires a new rate due to a vehicle change, a process that requires going back to the market, colleagues can now complete this task five times faster than before. Bullers says, “It’s incredible to be executing key processes four and five times faster now. We haven’t changed any code—this is purely Azure VMware Solution performance.”

The company also accelerated its response times within the high-pressure insurance aggregator market, which provides a really limited time in which to respond. Hastings Direct acts 1.6 times faster now than it did with its colocation datacenter architecture. “We’re seeing performance improvements everywhere,” says Bullers. “A credit card payment, for example, used to take us 4.8 seconds to process, and now we can do one in a mind-blowing 2.5 seconds. All told, we’ve increased performance by 1.6 times since our migration to Azure VMware Solution. And some of our customer journeys are so fast now that they can’t be discernably measured.”

With this boost in performance, Hastings Direct is poised to become a truly future-ready, cloud-first company capable of real innovation and market disruption. “We used Azure VMware Solution to leapfrog to the cloud,” Bullers states. “Through it, we moved from a legacy environment to our initial cloud scenario and positioned the company to easily move to a full Azure implementation with cloud-native capabilities. It’s amazing!”

Hastings Direct is just getting started. With its data in Azure, the company can now take advantage of Azure Machine Learning and other Azure services to take the insurance industry into the future. “As we are now 100 percent in the cloud, if Microsoft releases a product, we can consume it. The new frontier of AI and GPT and those capabilities gives us the ability to exploit the fact we are now cloud native,” says Bullers. “We’re just beginning to build out capabilities around Azure Machine Learning with the Azure OpenAI Service models that have been launched. We’ll continue to develop and apply that intelligence wherever we can along our pricing and claiming journeys. It’s exciting!”

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