Developing new products and services that "wow" customers is an ongoing commitment in the industry, especially in a fast-paced digital world. Firms providing financial services face constant pressure from the threat of nimble fintech firms and changing customer expectations. To stay ahead, they need to deliver value, self-service and applications that engage and motivate customers. Building first-class cloud services boils down to giving developers greater choice in how and where they build new applications. While multi-cloud promises limitless opportunities, without proper management, costs and complexities can quickly escalate.
Discovery Holdings has invested in VMware technology to gain a single view of its multi-cloud environment, standardize management tools, and accelerate the delivery of exciting new developments that have a real impact on customer well-being.
South African insurer Discovery Holdings not only provides insurance protection for customers, but also actively encourages customers to make healthier decisions to promote healthy development. Its Vitality program rewards customers for healthy behaviors in the form of points, which can be collected over a year to unlock health, lifestyle and leisure benefits.
And that's just one of its groundbreaking products. They also provide financial services such as online and investment banking, medical assistance, auto and home insurance, and travel services to clients worldwide. Some of the company's most innovative developments include a digital weight loss assistant, an app for booking discounted flights and an online portal to access and manage medical plans.
In addition to this, the company quickly launched its cloud computing journey in 2012 as they realized the need to bring new services to market quickly and provide employees and customers with a great digital experience.
Currently, its cloud computing business spans four large cloud service providers and has local data centers in 16 regions. To simplify the management of this multi-cloud environment, Discovery Holdings introduced VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth and VMware Aria Hub powered by VMware Aria Graph. In the future, it plans to expand the scope to gain a significant single view of the entire asset.
Centralize cloud management on one platform
Discovery Holdings' Platform Services team is responsible for providing seamless cloud services to internal users, helping them choose the right cloud or SaaS solution for their workloads.
"Managing disparate environments is complex, and they all have their own challenges. When you're dealing with OpEx across multiple data centers and CapEx across four different clouds, it's hard to get a clear picture of costs. There's no common interface or languages, and the metrics collected by each platform are different,” explained Johan Marais, senior platform services manager at Discovery Holdings. "VMware Aria Cost provides us with a standard set of tools that give us greater visibility and control over cost, performance, configuration, deployment and monitoring across our multi-cloud environment."
The company also needed a solution that could grow with its ambitions, including the flexibility to onboard new cloud providers in the future. "Implementing VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth is an important change in our multi-cloud strategy," Marais said. "Between 2018 and 2019, we doubled our investment in AWS cloud computing, while more effective management and waste reduction have reduced costs by 40%."
"VMware has been instrumental in efficiently running our multi-cloud environment for over 10 years. We recently introduced VMware Aria Automation for Secure Clouds to accelerate deployments across multiple clouds and enable internal customers to self-service access cloud accounts and workload," Marais said. "VMware Aria Automation gives us real-time visibility into our cloud security posture, and we can self-heal any issues, which reduces the risk of a failure causing an outage."
Having a single view of all cloud activity makes identifying these issues globally quick and easy. Once identified, they are prioritized by risk so the team can focus on the most critical incidents first.
"With VMware Aria Cost, we no longer have to hunt for information in a multi-region environment. We can get all the information at the click of a button, which is unprecedented," Marais explained.
Discovery Holdings also recently adopted VMware Aria Hub powered by VMware Aria Graph to gain comprehensive visibility into its two public cloud environments and gain powerful insights into security and costs. Going forward, the team will use it across all of the company's cloud environments. Employees are excited about using its advanced search capabilities, which leverage the powerful GraphQL query language to quickly find information with the click of a button, which will save time and improve the user experience.
cost-effective and efficient
Discovery Holdings has mastered the method of managing a multi-cloud environment without the complexities and opened up a world of opportunity for developing new products or services. VMware also supports the company's transition to DevOps, enabling it to maximize internal resources and do more with a small team.
Discovery Holdings estimates that without the automation that VMware provides, it would need to hire two additional full-time employees to manage reporting and security management.
"Keeping pace with rapid digital innovation is not easy," said Marais. "VMware allows us to respond quickly and maintain control. Our journey so far has been a huge success, thanks to a great team full of Curiosity, a desire to learn more about multi-cloud and equip them with the right tools."
This article was written by Giulia Alessio, Senior Manager, Global Client Advocacy.
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