Insurance Since 2014

Critical infrastructure support and performance tuning for a multinational insurer

Multinational insurer with operations in Colombia — subsidiary of a European group

Continuous WebSphere / MQ / DB2 infrastructure support with load testing and tuning prior to every production release

The challenge

The insurer operated its critical systems — agency portal, policy management and claims platforms — on IBM WebSphere infrastructure with MQ connectivity and DB2 databases. Every update or new feature had to go through a rigorous load testing and tuning process before going to production, in an environment where response times and availability were closely monitored. The internal team lacked the necessary specialization in these platforms to execute this process with the required depth.

The solution

We assumed technical support for the insurer's WebSphere/MQ/DB2 infrastructure and accompanied each production release cycle with load tests designed to simulate real demand peaks — mass policy renewal periods, peaks from weather events — and with the JVM configuration tuning, connection pool optimization and DB2 query tuning needed to guarantee the defined response times. Continuous support included production incident resolution and proactive management of platform updates.

Results

Continuous WebSphere / MQ / DB2 infrastructure support in production
Systematic load tests before each relevant production release
JVM and platform configuration tuning for defined response times
Reduction of performance incidents in production following the tuning process

Infrastructure support for a multinational insurer has a particular characteristic: technical standards and acceptance criteria are defined by the parent company, not the local team. This means the support team must be able to communicate in the technical terms and formats that global teams understand, and justify every technical decision with the level of detail an organization of that profile demands.

This project is representative of the type of relationship we build with insurance sector clients: specialized support for IBM platforms that few companies in Colombia master at the level required to operate in environments with international standards.

Technologies

Services applied

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