Business Day ahead of the curve interview: Avsharn Bachoo

1. ADVERTORIAL
R
ebuilding the legacy enterprise platform of a decades-
old insurance company and moving it to the cloud
is no small undertaking. From scale to complexity
parameters, this kind of migration would usually
take two to three years. So when we managed to
pull it off in under nine months, we were more than proud.
The journey brought its challenges of course, but we have a
newfound ability to be nimble, agile and responsive to our
customers’ needs. What’s more, we are now punching well
above our weight in a ring with competitors wielding much
larger IT budgets.
South African businesses tend to still see IT infrastructure as a
traditional capital expenditure rather than a pay-for-use model.
Many CTOs still purchase hardware and software intending
to use it for the next five years. This perspective is outdated
– storing and processing data has become extremely cheap,
so the global focus has changed to how you can harness the
power of your data to gain powerful analytic insights into your
operations. In the PPS case, we were motivated to move to the
cloud by cost control factors rather than cost reduction. We had
several strategic projects that required super-computing power
and wanted to avoid the capital expenditures associated with
upgrading infrastructure for these projects. We also wanted a
predictable, opex-based cost model.
At the outset, of course, we needed to run benchmark tests
between the various hyperscalers: we assessed compute
(processing power), storage, and databases. It soon became
clear, as we ran tests with our partner Siatik, that Google was
in the lead with excellent results across price, performance
and speed to market. In fact, Google ran 70% faster than
on premises, using fewer cores and less RAM. Google also
supported a multitude of open source applications, which is in
line with PPS’strategy of open source technologies.
The next step was to get our various teams at PPS on board.
Working in the cloud is often more about culture change than
technology. Our goal was to become a fintech business with
fintech attitude, so we needed to help our people understand
that building for digital goes beyond simply migrating to the
cloud. Our architecture had to be designed as an ecosystem of
social, mobile, analytics and cloud harmony. To achieve this, the
underlying tech infrastructure, processes and internal culture
all had to change. We have focused on getting people
and processes to apply the new technology, while still
achieving the consistency and predictability required
from a corporate.
Our migration approach was all about “test and learn”.
We had both failures and successes – and we learned
that failing fast is important. Each time we moved entire
systems to the cloud, we learned important lessons – from
network upgrades to VPN configurations – and even used it
as an opportunity to clean up legacy architecture. One of the
key challenges was understanding multi-tenancy and shared
resources. We didn’t want the usual “lift and shift”approach –
we wanted to use the as-a-service versions already available in
the cloud. This helped speed up the project and also reduced
the overall licensing costs.
After just nine months, all our enterprise architecture is now
in the cloud. We are using a combination of SAAS, PAAS, and
IAAS. With Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the cloud simply
provides a base such as servers, storage or networks. Customers
still have to set up and manage their own applications. In the
case of Platform as a Service (PaaS), the cloud allows customers
to develop their own applications without the complexity
of worrying about infrastructure. Finally, with Software as a
Service (SaaS), the cloud manages everything from applications
to infrastructure. Customers just have to use it!
AHEAD OF THE TECHNOLOGY CURVE
This means we can “snap”in and out as newer technologies
become available – and we are always ahead of the technology
curve, strategically and operationally. We have more stability,
scalability on demand, improved project ROI, and good
elasticity. As we realigned our budgets from capex to opex, we
took advantage of rebalancing our budgets across Run, Build
and Grow. The results were incredibly positive. With newly
available budget we’ve launched a number of innovation
projects to add further value. We’ve also built new products to
boost our business revenues, including using Tensorflow Neural
Networks to build out propensity models to upsell, cross-sell
and even downsell.
This is our story about taking a leap of faith to rebuild our core
systems and move away from legacy infrastructure. There are
also important lessons here for South African businesses. The
business models and processes that we have grown deeply
familiar with are being disrupted for the better. But, amid a
global paradigm shift in technology, South Africa is frequently
still stuck in a legacy mindset when it comes to the cloud.
Businesses are limping behind in cloud innovation and, as a
result, missing out on opportunities to innovate and grow, even
in tough economic conditions. It’s time to accept the change,
shed the legacy mindset, and get our heads firmly in the cloud.
Dr Avsharn Bachoo is CTO at PPS,
a South African international insurance
company. He is an expert in translating
business requirements into workable
solutions. Bachoo holds a PhD in
IT architecture from Wits University,
has published in several academic
journals and been a keynote speaker
at numerous international conferences.
www.pps.co.zawww.pps.co.za