Infrastructure
Most insurers start their modernization journey by deploying flexible, future-ready infrastructure. Modern cloud- and container-based infrastructure allows you to connect and integrate your core systems into a single, unified hybrid environment. This environment provides a consistent foundation for building and deploying applications across on-site and cloud infrastructure as needed.
Hybrid cloud infrastructure provides flexible, programmable IT resources with easier access to new tools and capabilities. Connected data streams permit deeper, more sophisticated insights and analytics. Fast, cost-effective replication and failover increases operational resiliency. And dynamic cloud resource pricing and scaling convert capital expenses to more predictable operational costs.
Kubernetes-based containers help you maximize the value and flexibility of this environment by allowing you to write code once and deploy it anywhere — bare metal, virtualized, or cloud infrastructure. Effective container platforms provide self-service capabilities that let users provision preapproved resources on demand, eliminating wait times and speeding development and operations. They also offer a broad, consistent set of tools, libraries, and runtimes so developers can work with their preferred tools.
Finally, using an application programming interface (API) centric approach to infrastructure design can ease integration with other cloud-based, container-based, and traditional systems, as well as third-party applications.
Applications
Core insurance applications designed for legacy hardware must be modified to run on cloud- and container-based infrastructure. Moving your applications into containers can simplify development, deployment, and portability across modern infrastructure. You can modernize and containerize applications in several ways:
- Lift and shift. Lifting and shifting packages your application with an optimized operating system and dependencies into a container that can be deployed anywhere your container platform runs. This does not modernize your application architecture — it helps you get started with a flexible foundation and gives you more time to rewrite your application.
- Augment with new layers. Augmenting with new layers adds a new interface layer to existing applications, making them easily accessible to other applications through APIs. As with lifting and shifting, the architecture of the existing application is unchanged.
- Rewrite. Rewriting an application is different from creating new applications from scratch; it is the process of creating new functionality to replace and retire existing applications. As part of an overall modernization strategy, rewriting can follow lifting and shifting and augmenting with new layers, and it is the only way to update the application architecture for a fully modern stack.
Approaches
Cloud-native approaches focus on iterative workflows, collaboration, automation, and microservices to speed application development and business agility. Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines provide lean, collaborative, and fully automated software delivery life cycles. Microservices architectures take advantage of loosely coupled, modular applications that are easier to build, test, deploy, update, and change. And DevOps methodologies incorporate culture, automation, and platform design to deliver increased business value and responsiveness through rapid, high-quality service delivery. Accordingly, 95% of insurance organizations have realized benefits — including enhanced partner experiences, more productive use of technology, and improved application quality — from cloud-native development initiatives.2
Modernize your core with Red Hat
Less than half of decision makers at insurance companies believe they can support their organization’s modernization execution efforts with their own internal resources.1 Red Hat can help you modernize more efficiently and effectively. Red Hat® hybrid cloud solutions provide advanced DevOps and cloud-native tools, cross-infrastructure portability and scalability, and the ability to run both existing and new cloud-native applications. These modular solutions let you deploy the components you need now, integrate with existing systems, and expand as needs change. You can also customize your installation with access to a large certified partner ecosystem and open source interoperability.
Each component provides key capabilities within the solution.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux® is an open source operating system that creates a consistent foundation for deploying applications across bare-metal, virtual, container, and all types of cloud environments.
Red Hat OpenShift® is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid cloud and multicloud deployments. Red Hat OpenShift is optimized to improve developer productivity and promote innovation.
Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes is a set of products, tools, and components for developing and maintaining cloud-native applications. It offers lightweight runtimes and frameworks for highly-distributed cloud architectures like microservices.
Red Hat Process Automation Manager is a platform for developing containerized microservices and applications that automate business decisions and processes. Process Automation Manager includes business process management (BPM), business rules management (BRM), and business resource optimization and complex event processing (CEP) technologies. It also contains a user experience platform to create engaging user interfaces for process and decision services with minimal coding.
Red Hat Integration is a comprehensive set of integration and messaging technologies that connect applications and data across hybrid infrastructures. It is an agile, distributed, containerized, and API-centric solution. Red Hat Integration provides service composition and orchestration, application connectivity and data transformation, real-time message streaming, change data capture, and API management — all combined with a cloud-native platform and toolchain to support the full spectrum of modern application development.
Red Hat Fuse is a distributed, cloud-native integration platform that uses an API-centric, container-based architecture to decouple services, allowing them to be created, extended, and deployed independently.
Red Hat 3scale API Management allows you to share, secure, distribute, control, and monetize your APIs on an infrastructure platform built for performance, customer control, and future growth.
Red Hat AMQ is a flexible messaging platform that delivers information reliably, permitting real-time integration and connecting the Internet of Things (IoT).