WTW

From soaring costs to boundless possibilities, witness how insurance leader WTW shattered the confines of traditional data management, embracing the cloud to revolutionize its global operations.

Faced with rising on-premises costs and maintenance, WTW, a British-American multinational company, needed to get out of its data centers globally and into the cloud. Using NetApp cloud and storage technologies, WTW made the complicated transition – spanning more than 140 countries across APAC, EMEA, and the Americas – a seamless process that revolutionized data access while reducing costs.

With more than 40,000 employees, having cloud access to global data was critical. Using Microsoft Azure’s cloud infrastructure provided a better user experience, a single source of truth for data, and the ability to easily scale.

WTW used a variety of NetApp solutions to deliver cutting-edge storage and computing for its Insurance Consultancy and Technology group, which spearheaded the migration project. With improved capabilities within Azure, WTW was able to mitigate any impacts to its far-flung user base. By communicating effectively with the different teams, they developed a solid implementation strategy that included a new centralized data estate for improved cross-team workflow.

The key strategic goal for WTW was eliminating its on-premises data centers. WTW did not want to be in the business of data centers or data stored in individual country server rooms. In APAC alone, it had data spread out across a dozen countries, thousands of miles apart. Globally, the company had 2 petabytes of protected data – strictly governed by financial rules – that it needed to migrate.

Data timeliness, integrity, and retention are essential in insurance. WTW wanted to improve operational efficiencies in data sharing to better support global teams and remote work capabilities.

Before the cloud, WTW worked largely within siloes with non-integrated infrastructures. This disparity required redundant storage and compute infrastructure at each site, and additional tooling and processes to migrate or copy data between locations. Collaboration between teams was much more difficult because of the time needed to copy data to the appropriate sites. Additionally, IT was tasked with maintaining and keeping infrastructure running in multiple sites for the same use case.

Because of its long-standing relationship with NetApp, WTW used the syncing and migration capabilities of BlueXP’s Cloud Sync and Cloud Volumes ONTAP (CVO) as the project's backbone. The goal was to create a scalable, resilient, and cost-efficient intelligent data infrastructure. Because of insurance industry guidelines, data integrity and security were also imperative. The company’s associates also needed to work globally and collaborate on cross-team projects using the same data.

The result streamlined overall IT management, significantly cut costs, and boosted WTW’s productivity on a global scale. NetApp’s CVO enabled scalable and flexible storage in the cloud and is accessible via remote global locations.

By using the benefits of cloud — demand elasticity, financial transparency, and reduced physical infrastructure costs — WTW can now deliver a data experience that is seamless and consistent for associates, no matter where they are in the world. It tremendously simplified their operating model with a single source of truth. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP's native tiering capabilities to Azure provide huge cost savings versus other SMB solutions.

Through this innovation, customers of WTW can experience a remarkable transformation in their insurance journey. With seamless data access powered by the cloud, customers can now enjoy swift and effortless interactions, granting them the ability to manage their policies, file claims, and access critical information with just a few clicks. This convenience saves valuable time and empowers customers to make informed decisions promptly, ensuring their peace of mind and financial well-being.

Moreover, the fortified security measures implemented by WTW within Azure, in collaboration with NetApp, safeguard customer data with utmost vigilance, ensuring that their sensitive information is shielded from potential threats. This fusion of innovation, access, and security culminates in an elevated customer experience, where trust and satisfaction flourish, and the insurance journey becomes a seamless and empowering endeavor.

For companies undergoing similar migrations, it’s vital to know the functional and nonfunctional requirements. WTW’s key requirements were to ensure that its global end users had a seamless experience when working with the data, coupled with a robust, resilient and performant data storage platform.

WTW’s IT teams had to clearly communicate with the business. All too often, IT may be implementing critical solutions but not communicating effectively with key stakeholders. The business needs to understand the journey, just as IT needs to anticipate any negative impacts.

WTW is continuing to refine and mature the delivery. As the model matures, WTW will implement more automated processes with improved data classification. With the cloud, it’s far more cost-effective when you understand what data you are using and how you are using it. As the data footprint grows, data tiering and effective retention strategies are essential. NetApp is helping to identify the best tiering models to reduce costs on cold data to pennies on the dollar.

In the meantime, WTW has more time to focus on what it does best: “managing people, risk, and capital to propel the world’s leading businesses forward.”