Case study overview
About Claim Technology
Claim Technology is an award winning Insurtech technology provider to simplify access into a wealth of insurtech services. Claim Technology has created over 50 best-in-class Insurtech capability providers available through one single connection for their customers using the AWS platform. They have been industry award finalists 15 times and winner of the Technology Innovation of the Year award.
The Challenge
Whilst Claim Technology applications are user-friendly, the backend architecture and AWS infrastructure was complex. Claim Technology wanted to optimise their application performance, security and cost by ensuring it followed AWS latest best practices – as part of their evolution and drive to maintain the highest standards.
The Solution
Claim Technology requested a series of AWS Well-Architected Reviews by CirrusHQ, of their workloads to optimise their Cloud platform.
The review and agreed actions gave Claim Technology the knowledge to make step changes on their complex infrastructure to provide the greatest benefits. Many identified highest priority tasks were remediated as part of the review, providing greater performance and reduced latency of content distribution as well as additional cost savings.
The Benefits
Improved content distribution
CloudFront enabled greater performance and reduced latency.Optimised production environment
Improved architecture aligned to support business growth.Increased security
More performant, robust and future proofed security.
About APN Partner CirrusHQ and Amazon Web Services
Claim Technology contacted CirrusHQ via the AWS Partner finder tool when searching for a Well-Architected Framework partner. CirrusHQ’s undertakes 100s of Well-Architected reviews per year to help organisations build and operate secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for applications – to help organisations find opportunities for significant cost savings, improved application performance, and reduced security risks. This rigorous approach has earned CirrusHQ high levels of customer satisfaction feedback and recognition from AWS.
“Utilising an AWS Partner meant that we brought in lots of experience that could be instructed to manage the project from an architecture perspective which was a great relief for Claim Technology’s in-house development team..”
Ashley Preece Product Owner, Claim Technology
Next Steps
To learn more about how AWS and APN Partner CirrusHQ can help your organisation, contact us today or visit visit www.cirrushq.com.
Technical case study
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
Claim Technology is an award-winning Insurtech technology provider and utilises the AWS platform. As part of the evolution and drive to maintain the highest standards they decided to undertake a Well-Architected Review and looked to a trusted AWS partner to assist them.
Claim Technology selected CirrusHQ to conduct an AWS Well-Architected review of their workloads. The full audit, remediation plan, and resulting updates, ultimately lead to 81.6% of high-level risks being mitigated from production.
Critical achievements to Claim Technology’s infrastructure included enhancing the capabilities of AWS CloudFront, securing content and performance to ensure effective distribution of their services. In addition, a number of key operational activities were mitigated by on-boarding Claim Technology to CirrusHQ’s Managed Services to allow their developers to focus on their application and to benefit from the experience of CirrusHQ.
Overall the AWS Well-Architected program delivered significant benefits to Claim Technology and provided a position of strength in infrastructure and operations, a positive position to continue to drive success in their technology service.
CLAIM TECHNOLOGY:
Claim Technology has created a gateway marketplace with access to over 50 best-in-class insurtechs, available through a single connection for their customers. On top of this their 1-click Insurtech™ deploys fully operational plug&play solutions for companies with just one click providing instant access. Their technology has put them as industry awards finalists 11 times including winning the Technology and Innovation of the year award.
CHALLENGE:
Whilst their application is very user-friendly, the backend architecture was very complex and therefore their AWS infrastructure matched this. Claim Technology wanted to bring themselves into line with the Well-Architected framework from AWS and believed CirrusHQ were the best people to do this for them.
Claim Technology stated: “Utilising an AWS Partner meant that we brought in lots of experience that could be instructed to manage the project from an architecture perspective was a great relief for Claim Technology’s over-stretched, in-house development team.”
WHY CIRRUSHQ:
CirrusHQ’s AWS certified team undertakes 100s of Well-Architected reviews per year. Our end-to-end approach with our customers is to deliver successful outcomes from the review process, ensure tightening of best practices, and strengthening production workloads. Our
rigorous approach has earned us high levels of customer satisfaction feedback and recognition from AWS. We take pride in delivering a highly engaged process, working closely and in partnership with the customer, and addressing the high-level risks that the process identifies to provide a critical step change in infrastructure best practices and a pathway to ongoing improvement.
INFRASTURE STEP CHANGE FROM THE WELL-ARCHITECTED REVIEW:
The AWS Well-Architected review was conducted with key team members and interrogated the 5 key infrastructure pillars against the architecture landscape shown below.
The review process ignites critical conversations about the infrastructure, which in turn uncovers risks categorised as high, medium or low. The true benefit of the review process is the action plans born from the reviews and presented to address short, medium and long actions to mitigate key risks found.
CirrusHQ’s short term action plan addressed the following areas to give Claim Technology critical benefits in:
Security focus:
- Implemented controls within their content delivery (through AWS CloudFront) to restrict access and tightened controls of assets
- Implementing protection at the perimeter of their application using the AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall)
- Separation of AWS accounts for controlled and non-controlled environments ● Increased security on data in transit and at rest
Operational focus:
- Radically changed Operations by moving them to CirrusHQ’s Managed Service team to establish fine-grain control of production, and provide support 24/7
- Established an Operational guide to recover from incident against agreed SLAs These benefits rectified 81.6% of the HRI within the short term activities.
The review and agreed actions gave Claim Technology the knowledge to make step changes on their complex infrastructure. The positive engagement, increased knowledge, and understanding of protecting their production workload, ensured that moving operations to CirrusHQ was the clear direction to reduce risk on their critical and complex workloads.
One architectural change within the review strengthened the use of AWS CloudFront and tighter controls of their content distribution.
The security pillar of review flagged a risk around the enforcement of encryption at transit by enforcing only https in CloudFront along with Origin Access Identity (OAI) in CloudFront. To mitigate this risk CirrusHQ designed the solution in the architecture diagram above focusing on AWS CloudFront and utilising Lambda@Edge. CirrusHQ enabled OAI to restrict access between Amazon S3 buckets to CloudFront and reduce permissions to disable public access for s3 buckets. A redirection Lambda on the Viewer Request redirects old Claim Technology URLs to their new URLs. The ‘Headers Lambda’ function on the Origin Response adds security headers to the request. These configurations and additional architecture around AWS CloudFront, ensures the managing of identities and permissions to assets, and ensures the solution adheres to best practices within AWS. The traffic going via CloudFront enables greater performance and reduced latency, as well as additional cost savings.
RESULTS AND BENEFITS:
The AWS Well Architected process demonstrates how each engagement for customers is a journey to benefit and maximise their decision to adopt ‘Cloud’ infrastructure. Claim Technology and CirrusHQ undertook a set of reviews that ultimately ended up with an ongoing trusted partnership.
For Claim Technology building on an award winning technology, implementing further secure elements, and gaining managed services from CirrusHQ, is a continuation of their drive to demonstrate they are best-in-class and pushing their markets forward.
TESTIMONIAL:
Claim Technology’s Product Owner highlighted:
“CirrusHQ conducted a full audit and produced a list of prioritised remediation items that we have worked through over the course of a few months at the pace that we set. It has been great to know that our production environment is stable, secure and speedy whilst also being continuously improved every month based on predefined action items with our dedicated account manager David.
Much like the insurance products in our industry, CirrusHQ acts as a policy for us and our clients to provide peace of mind that if anything were to go wrong, they will be there to help.”
ABOUT CIRRUSHQ:
As an AWS Advanced Consultancy with 50+ staff certifications, we are 100% exclusively AWS cloud which enables us to have a broad and deep expertise on the platform. Customer Service is also critical to us as our NPS score +78 validates that we care about our customers and provide excellent service.
