Sentinel Migration
Fourteen years of on-premise insurance systems moved to Azure, without a single unplanned outage.
- Client
- Sentinel Assurance
- Industry
- Insurance
- Discipline
- Cloud
- Duration
- 8 months, 2024
The problem
SentinelrancorepolicyadministrationonhardwareinaJohannesburgbasement,pastendofsupport,withadisasterrecoveryplannobodyhadtestedsince2019.Twoofthefourpeoplewhounderstoodthedeploymentprocesshadleft.
The regulator had begun asking pointed questions about operational resilience, and the answer was not one the board wanted to give twice.
What we did
We started with a dependency map produced from network traffic rather than documentation, which surfaced nine integrations nobody had recorded. That map determined the migration sequence.
An Azure landing zone with identity, networking, and policy guardrails went in before any workload moved. Then we migrated in waves, lowest risk first, each with a rehearsed rollback and a measured performance comparison.
The final cutover of policy administration happened on a Sunday morning after three full rehearsals against production-scale data. Recovery is now drilled quarterly, with evidence the regulator accepts.
Services applied
Technology
- Microsoft Azure
- Terraform
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- PostgreSQL
- Grafana
- GitHub Actions
- OpenTelemetry
Gallery
Inside the build.
Results
What changed, measured after launch.
- Unplanned outages during migration
- 0Unplanned outages during migration
- Reduction in infrastructure run cost
- 0%Reduction in infrastructure run cost
- Tested recovery time objective
- 0h → 22mTested recovery time objective
- Undocumented integrations found and mapped
- 0Undocumented integrations found and mapped
“Eight months, a core system replatformed, and our customers never noticed a thing. That was exactly the outcome we wanted.”
Marius van der MerweChief Information Officer, Sentinel AssuranceRelated work
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