Subsidiary of the VYV group, Mutex is a provident and retirement savings insurer. It employs 650 people, including 100 in the information systems department. An insurance ETI, it generates approximately one billion euros in turnover with three million members and more than 50,000 companies.
Mutex has also been a public cloud infrastructure since June 2020. These technologies are now largely mature. And many companies, multinationals such as SMEs and ETIs, operate cloud services. In insurance, however, IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) is still underdeveloped. Mutex therefore stands out in this area.
The promised apocalypse did not happen
Mutex wanted to gain in robustness and agility on its aging (outsourcing) infrastructure. A modernization was necessary for the company, which took advantage of the renewal of the outsourcing contract to switch to the AWS cloud. The insurer previously requested and obtained in 2019 the approval of the regulator, the ACPR.
But its DSI, Dominique Bossard, also had to convince internally and among the leaders. “I was promised hell; hell on the fillers; hell on technical difficulty. However, the 100% migration took place in a relatively short time. The infrastructure is now managed by Inetum and AWS,” he confided during the IDC Cost Optimization & FinOps conference.
His conclusion after two years of running in the public cloud: “hell is not really what I was promised”, rejoices the director of information systems at Mutex. The insurer has not reported any production incident since the lift & shift migration in June 2020.
Beware of the budget
However, this success does not reflect a lack of vigilance on the costs of the cloud. Because in this area, slippages are real and errors can be costly. In 2021, 46% of European enterprises reported exceeding their cloud budget, according to IDC.
Mutex’s ISD has, in this area, made use of “its financial sensitivity”, prior to the move to the cloud. “IT is an exhaustible and expensive commodity,” emphasizes Dominique Bossard.
To control its expenditure, the insurer has therefore implemented a FinOps approach and created a dedicated position. “FinOps is central,” insists the CIO, who recognizes that cost control comes up against the profusion of information and the complexity of pricing.
Lower IT costs and foundations for transformation
Mutex has, on the cloud as on FinOps, increased its skills. Initially, the company made the decision not to use the resource reservation option. It now uses it for certain applications, which generates savings.
But the reservation is also an insurance against a peak load situation on the AWS infrastructure. A lived episode. The available resources were then limited and allocated to reservations, preventing the restart of Mutex virtual machines.
As far as cloud costs are concerned, Dominique Bossard encourages people to anticipate and develop mastery of the parameters and proximity to their outsourcer. This requires almost daily monitoring of expenses and deviations from the projected budget.
Facilitate recruitment
Overall, after two years, Mutex reports a drop in its IT costs, even though the number of assets (virtual servers) to manage has increased. This infrastructure now facilitates the modernization of business applications, in particular through cloud-native development. It also encouraged the deployment of a new Data platform.
Another unanticipated benefit of the cloud: recruitment. The use of these technologies acts as a facilitator in terms of recruitment. It is also a loyalty lever for the teams in place, appreciates the DSI.