Cloud Foundation: Groupe Mutuel boosts customer experience from the cloud

Around 1.3 million people entrust their health insurance to Groupe Mutuel (GM). The number 1 in French-speaking Switzerland also counts around 24,000 companies among its customers and offers a broad range of insurance services in the areas of private liability, legal protection insurance, life insurance and many more.

GM employs around 2,300 people and covers all of Switzerland with its five service centers. The insurance group wants to further improve customer experience with modern, agile web applications following a Hybrid-Cloud approach.

Challenge

Cloud technologies such as the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) accelerate the digitalization of the healthcare system, create new diagnostic and treatment options and thus facilitate communication between patients, insurers and doctors. Groupe Mutuel wants to harness the power of the Cloud in order to reach objectives such as:

To deepen the experience with Public Cloud services and define best practices
To advance the swift development of a modern, agile development platform for high-quality digital products and a better customer experience
To determine and implement a Hybrid-Cloud strategy that meets the regulatory requirements, in particular when dealing with sensitive data

So-called vendor lock-ins can be avoided with Multi- and Hybrid Cloud approaches. Kubernetes, released by Google as an open-source project in 2015, not only helps companies with the development, maintenance and scaling of containerized applications, but also with the implementation of these applications across various cloud providers. To use GKE on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as the basis of a modern, agile development environment, GM relies on the expertise of Wabion.

“In a short period of time, we arrived at a modern, agile development environment for new applications in order to capture sensitive customer data more easily, but always securely, and to use it for a better customer experience. This is due on the one hand to the quality and user-friendliness of Google Cloud, on the other hand to Wabion’s extensive GCP expertise, which we have always had access to. We want to continue building on this mix of technology and consulting expertise in the future.”

Martin Garcia
Lead Architect & Innovation Head Groupe Mutuel

Solution

Wabion has carried out a so-called Cloud Foundation with GM. The goal of this cloud foundation was to set up a GM-specific GCP organization and lay the foundation for the targeted, agile development of new web applications. As a leading Google Cloud Premier Partner in German-speaking countries, Wabion has tailored Google Best Practices for the DACH region. The following illustration illustrates the Cloud Foundation in the so-called “Cloud Enterprise Stack” with its three levels and four pillars:

Solutions at the Applications level are based on GCP products in the Technology Stack (GKE, BigQuery etc.). With Cloud Identity, Cloud IAM, Networking, Monitoring, Billing and Support, the Cloud Foundation contains the basic configurations of a specific GCP instance and enables the efficient reuse of these configurations via Automation. Governance, Security, Accelerators (tools) and Training are part of all levels of the Cloud Enterprise Stack and all stages of the Cloud Foundation:

1. Concept

In an initial two-day workshop, the Google Cloud experts from Wabion worked with the GM project team to develop the basic concepts for the Themes of the Cloud Foundation. The pragmatic approach enabled the quick implementation of Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) as well as the consideration of GM-specific and industry-specific requirements (e.g. data processing in Switzerland or the EU). In parallel to the implementation, Wabion experts supported GM in deepening various topics such as:

GKE: To enable GM to quickly implement MVPs for web applications, Wabion made its expertise available for setting up an agile development platform based on GKE
GCP Security as one of four pillars for every GCP organization
Networking and IAM according to GM’s policies
Infrastructure Automation with Terraform

2. Execution

The concept for the GM-specific GCP organization developed by Wabion enabled the GM project team to initiate the implementation. Thanks to the existing GKE-based development environment, the work for the MVPs of three web applications began. This pragmatic and practical approach accelerated GM’s journey to the cloud, as it can be illustrated with Google’s Cloud Adoption Framework:

The four themes Learn, Lead, Scale, Secure go through the phases Tactical, Strategic and Transformational. At the Cloud Foundation level, the basic configurations for Cloud identity, Cloud IAM, Networking etc. (see first image above) focus on Scale and Secure. Wabion provided GM with expertise throughout the entire implementation, supplementing the project team’s activities and expediting GM’s transformation to a company that uses the full power of Cloud Technology.

3. Automation

In particular, Wabion leveraged its GCP expertise for GM within the Automation part of the Foundation. The configurations, automated with Terraform (Infrastructure as a Code) and therefore easily reusable, set the course for the rapid implementation of further GCP integration steps by GM.

Benefits

With the Cloud Foundation, GM has made a big leap in the execution of its Hybrid-Cloud Strategy. Thanks to the support of the Wabion GCP experts, GM is able to develop agile new solutions for rapidly changing customer needs:

Compared to the previous on-prem approach, the new development environment based on GKE is more flexible, easier to scale and more cost-effective.
Cloud-native functionalities offer new options in terms of solution design and not only reduce costs, but also the time-to-market and maintenance efforts (“LowOps”).
GM developers can focus on improving the customer experience of the applications – the “go live” of 3 web applications will take place soon.

As “home” of Kubernetes, Google Cloud offers great advantages for the development of containerized, agile applications. With the new platform Anthos, which is based on GKE, Google Cloud takes application development to the next level, enabling containerized applications to be operated both on-premise and in the cloud. As a participant in the Google Anthos Acceleration Program, Wabion is looking forward to supporting GM in the further implementation of its Hybrid-Cloud strategy based on Anthos.