USI Insurance Services boosts application security and reliability with Dynatrace

Protecting sensitive customer data

USI Insurance provides tailored insurance services to customers across the US, delivered through cutting-edge home-grown and third-party solutions. One such solution is the USI ONE platform, which enables employees to use analytics, network resources, and strategic planning tools to create fully customized insurance offerings for customers. The USI ONE platform relies on sensitive customer data to ensure USI’s offerings are aligned to their unique needs, making application security imperative.

However, when scanning for vulnerabilities, teams relied on time-consuming manual processes. Since these scans were static and focused on pre-production, it was easy for newly discovered vulnerabilities to go undetected in production environments until the next scheduled scan. It was also difficult to spot vulnerabilities within some third-party applications, which remained a ‘black box’ for USI’s teams. In addition to these security challenges, USI also experienced application performance issues that were affecting end-users, and teams were losing valuable hours of productivity.

Taking a more intelligent approach

To maintain the security of its sensitive customer data and deliver better end-user experiences, USI needed an intelligent observability and security platform that could provide visibility across its complex environment. It needed to automatically identify and prioritize vulnerabilities and performance issues in production applications based on risk to the business, its employees, and customers. After evaluating the market, USI selected Dynatrace as the best fit for its needs.

“Dynatrace was the obvious choice for USI,” said Wendy Mathis, Software Lead Architect at USI. “It gives us the whole package, including user experience insights, which we’ve never had before. With Dynatrace’s comprehensive security features, we can see what’s going on with an application or a server in real time, so we can quickly narrow down and identify any issues that we might face. Dynatrace has become my best friend as a developer. I can identify the root-cause of issues and quickly work out which team I need to solve the problem.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Faster resolution through continuous discovery: With Dynatrace, USI can continuously monitor every tier of its application stack automatically. As a result, teams have the answers they need to resolve issues before they impact users and catch vulnerabilities before they’re exploited. In fact, Dynatrace has substantially reduced USI’s mean-time-to-resolution. Previously, it could take two to three days for teams to identify and resolve a problem or vulnerability. With Dynatrace, they’ve been able to reduce this to as little as 20 minutes.
• Improved operational alignment: As an all-in-one solution, Dynatrace is helping USI to lay the foundations for a longer-term shift towards a DevSecOps culture. With Dynatrace providing a single source of truth, teams can now collaborate more easily to release better software faster, and to detect and respond to flaws in production applications more efficiently.
• Deeper collaboration with vendors: The end-to-end observability from Dynatrace is enabling USI to collaborate better with the third-party solution providers it relies on, leading to faster resolution times when issues arise with their software. Dynatrace provides teams with visibility into third-party systems, so USI can identify performance issues in the external software and notify the vendor of the root cause.
• Better user experiences: With Dynatrace’s Digital Experience Monitoring capabilities, USI can drill down into user sessions to identify exactly how they are navigating a system and uncover issues that might be preventing them from completing a transaction. Teams can then leverage those insights to optimize the application, to enhance user productivity and drive better outcomes for customers.

“Dynatrace is the solution we never knew we needed but now we can’t live without,” says Mathis. “Cybersecurity is a constantly moving target and new vulnerabilities appear all the time. With Dynatrace, we can be proactive, as it lets us know when we need to make a change to keep our applications and data secure. We can catch issues and counter attacks before they impact end-users. Ultimately, Dynatrace helps us make sense of the craziness that happens in a development world and be more efficient in managing our environment.”