Athora Belgium moves SAS platform to cloud in record time

A compelling and urgent move entails all kinds of limitations, but also offers unexpected opportunities. The Belgian branch of insurance and reinsurance group Athora discovered this when it had to migrate an essential part of its local application landscape on a very short notice. With the help of LACO, premier SAS partner and data specialist, they moved their SAS environment to the cloud.

In January 2019, Athora Group acquired Generali Belgium, which had been active on the Belgian insurance market for nearly 120 years. Today, this insurance provider offers a broad range of life insurance solutions to some 200,000 individual and corporate customers through its network of more than 500 independent brokers and financial advisors. Athora Belgium currently has 220 employees.

“With an acquisition comes integration, transformation and inevitably IT too”, says Nicolas Campodonico, COO of Athora Belgium. And those are precisely the three responsibilities that he was entrusted with after the acquisition: first as Head of Integration and Transformation, then as CITO. “My main assignment was to design the systems to fit into the Athora environment”

The integration and transformation process that followed the acquisition by Athora included a physical move to a new office at a new location in Brussels. However, it was not intended nor possible to move the existing ICT infrastructure along. “Most of our infrastructure was located in a remote data center. There was no immediate problem there. However, a smaller but nonetheless important part of the same infrastructure was still located in our old office building. So we had to find a solution for that suboptimal situation. And quickly as well, because the move was already planned six months later.”

That ‘smaller part’ of the infrastructure included a limited number of servers running a few critical applications supporting, among other things, risk management and simulations. Those core applications, including a cash flow prediction engine, were developed in-house a long time ago using SAS technology. Over the years they had also grown organically, resulting in a complex and untransparent environment which was difficult to re-engineer – at least not at a reasonable cost. Moreover, both the scalability and the performance of the applications left a lot to be desired. Generali had already managed to cope with that last shortcoming in the past. At the request of LACO’s SAS experts, their application and infrastructure landscape for risk management had already been optimized before.

“LACO had already a good understanding of our SAS platform and the actuarial risk model it contained. LACO therefore was ahead of any other supplier: they were familiar with our IT environment and with our business. In addition, we had only positive memories of our previous collaboration”, explains Nicolas Campodonico. “So when we had to decide on the right SAS migration partner, LACO was the logical choice.”

A physical move also implies a physical migration of the ICT infrastructure, you would think. But in close consultation with the Athora project team, in Belgium and at group level, LACO soon came to the conclusion that such a traditional migration was no longer feasible, if only because of the tight timing. The complexity of the existing environment also played a part in this consideration, in addition to the fact that the infrastructure requirements did not match the standards of Athora Group’s hosting facilities. Migrating to Athora’s corporate data center in Germany was therefore not an option either.