Zurich North America accelerates cloud migration in the drive to net-zero with Dynatrace and Ahead

Zurich North America is one of the largest insurance providers in the U.S., supporting consumers and businesses across a range of industries, from agriculture to construction. The insurer aims to be one of the most responsible and impactful businesses in the world and is striving for net-zero emissions by 2050 as part of that mission. To support these efforts, Zurich North America is transforming its IT environment, moving its applications from a legacy data center to the cloud to reduce its carbon footprint while improving the resiliency and efficiency of its services.

To maintain business continuity, it was critical that Zurich had real-time visibility into the performance and health of its applications as they moved to the cloud, with zero blind spots. To achieve that, its teams needed full control and the ability to deploy observability capabilities as cloud services went live. In addition, Zurich wanted to give its teams visibility into the CO2 and energy consumption of its cloud environment, so they could better optimize over-provisioned resources and make more sustainable choices.

Working with Ahead, its strategic transformation partner, Zurich designed a new target operating model for its cloud environment, highlighting observability as a core component. The insurer wanted a solution that could scale dynamically to provide visibility across its end-to-end technology stack and enable teams to baseline the performance of applications as they moved to the cloud. Ahead recommended that Dynatrace would best meet Zurich’s needs, due to its extensibility and intelligent automation capabilities, powered by its Davis AI engine.

“The really cool thing about Dynatrace is that it integrates so well with so many of the applications and interfaces that we need to do business,” said Lindsay Buell, Head of Cloud Foundations Services, Zurich North America. “With Dynatrace, you just look at the console, ask a couple of questions, and you have really good insight into what your problem space is. That means you can just call the team that needs to be there rather that calling every team, and you get it resolved faster and at less cost.”

• Accelerated migration: In partnership with Dynatrace, Ahead created a bespoke services package that reduced the operating costs of Zurich’s previous observability solution by 30%. These savings enabled Zurich to accelerate its journey to the cloud while eliminating blind spots, by freeing up resource to monitor more applications. As a result, Zurich increased the number of applications running in the cloud by 162% in less than two years.
• Improved stability: By the end of that period of accelerated migration, Zurich had moved 80% of its applications to the cloud. Despite such rapid change, it had also seen an 89% reduction in the number of IT service incidents, going from 71 to just eight tickets in a single year. This improvement was driven by Dynatrace’s ability to identify problems early, so Zurich’s teams can resolve them before its services are impacted.
• Faster recovery: The AI-powered insights from Dynatrace enable Zurich’s teams to instantly identify which services are affected by problems with third-party solutions such as APIs and cloud services. As a result, they don’t need to manually assess the impact of events such as major global IT outages; they can just prioritize bringing critical services back online quickly.
• Better sustainability: Dynatrace’s Carbon Impact App enables Zurich’s cloud services team to understand the CO2 and energy consumption patterns of its infrastructure and identify ways of optimizing the environment to run more efficiently. As a result, its teams can make better, more data-driven decisions to support Zurich’s drive to achieve net zero by 2050.

“The years when we had the most significant amount of change were also when we had the fewest incidents, and I can only attribute that to Dynatrace,” continued Buell. “As well as making us more resilient, Dynatrace gives us an amazing look into the CO2 and energy consumption of our cloud environment. With those insights, we can make better and more eco-friendly decisions to become a more responsible business.”