Accelerating AXA’s Business Transformation with an Industry Leading Cloud Strategy 2/2

Written by Ash Shah

Following my first post : (My top tips for successfully executing an enterprise-wide Cloud program) I’m back with the latest updates and my personal views on AXA’s Cloud program.

Last month, our global program reached a major milestone with over 1,000 applications now on the cloud and 3,000 virtual machines (VMs) on our private cloud. This marks an incredible achievement for a program that only started two and a half years ago. This accomplishment reflects the commitment across AXA entities to accelerate our IT transformation to delivering against AXA’s Payer to Partner and Simplification strategies.

The way customers choose and interact with insurance companies is evolving, and AXA prioritizes the customer at the forefront of these changing market demands. Today, our customers expect a fast, seamless, digital experience. “Move to the Cloud” enables IT to increase AXA’s agility and ability to set-up new services in a short timeframe, with higher availability and reliability. This via more secure and compliant processes.

The ultimate goal of “Move to the Cloud” is to migrate 6,000 to 6,500 applications spanning 60+ countries. This is a major step for an organisation like AXA, which has a significant legacy footprint and global operations. Our 1000th application, with AXA Italy, focused on the Business to Consumer market. As the global director of this program, I’m proud to share that our innovative cloud strategy includes the creation of the following enablers:

• Entity engagement and entity-led approach with central governance. This program is not led solely by HQ.
• A high level of community awareness, engagement, and shared accountability through the creation of a migration community. The creation of this community enabled the entity stakeholders in charge of migration plans to share experiences, best practices and lessons learnt.
• A defined, strategic migration plan that started with all large business units to take advantage of their capacity. We leveraged this to help growing entities.
• Global and local compliance and risk frameworks to help deal with regulatory requirements.
• Full transparency on migration status, progress, updates, accomplishments and setbacks.
• A Cloud Broker community to create a one-stop shop for cloud solutions and encourage knowledge transfer amongst AXA entities.

Additionally, I’m thrilled to see our global teams and entities working closely together to deliver solutions that will overcome future cloud stumbling blocks. The challenges that AXA currently faces include: latency and performance issues in the hybrid cloud model, increased complexity of migrations (we completed straightforward migrations first), and continuous change of pace in cloud technology and regulation.

Regardless of the impressive milestones we’ve achieved, the journey continues… From my perspective, the pace at which cloud programs are evolving is significantly faster than anything else I’ve seen in the past and this journey is an exciting one. Our next major ambition is to host 25% of the Group’s eligible applications on the cloud by the end of 2019. I’m confident that with the commitment of AXA entities, colleagues, stakeholder and partners, we’ll be able to maintain the strong momentum we have behind us and reach our goals.