Irish Life move to the Cloud
run their core financial systems

With Irish Life’s core financials system (Oracle E-Business Suite 11i) becoming out-of-vendor support, Version 1 as a long-standing and trusted IT consulting partner to the organisation presented a compelling business case to upgrade and migrate to Cloud based on three primary benefits:

1. Annualised savings of 26% for the customer over the on-premise equivalent solution.
2. System vitality – the responsibility for keeping the infrastructure and application current transferring from the customer to vendor and supplier respectively.
3. Supportability (the responsibility for application support transferring to Version 1, scalability (capacity for any number of new users added in minutes) and flexibility (ability to spin up new development or test environments as needed).

Irish Life is committed to delivering innovative products backed by the highest standards of customer service. ‘Platform decisions’ are a core pillar of the company’s IT strategy which ensures the On-Premise Versus Cloud debate takes place each time a system is to be introduced, replaced or updated. However, like most Financial Services companies, Irish Life takes a conservative and risk adverse approach to adopting new technology given the regulation and compliance demands of the industry.

Version 1 was able resolve Irish Life’s cloud adoption concerns by utilising its Oracle Cloud Reference Architecture The architecture was developed in conjunction with Oracle and is based on best-practices across a number of key areas including Business Support Services such as contracts, billing, compliance and reporting; Product & Service Catalogue; Management & Operations such as deployment, SLAs, third party services and Cloud Security including data protection, integration and connectivity, identity, information security, risk and compliance. Utilising the architecture in the case of Irish Life provided answers to thousands of questions essential to ensure the right cloud solution to address their unique business challenges including specific regulatory and compliance demands related to a core financial system operating in a regulated environment and subject to controls such as ICOFR, PII, CYBER, ISO, OSFI etc.

Commenting on the challenges of moving to Cloud for Financial Services organisations such as Irish Life, Lynch said “It sometimes feels like we are a security firm with a financial services wing. This project has the potential to allow us outsource a large volume of those activities and get back to focusing on our company vision ‘Helping people build better futures’.”

Integration is one of the major barriers to cloud adoption. Understanding how applications will talk to each other and ensuring cloud and enterprise are effectively connected is challenging. In the case of Irish Life, the enterprise landscape is a highly integrated system with Oracle E-Business Suite at its core with numerous application and data integration points to on-premise and third-party systems such as Claims, Reporting, Payments, HR and other systems. These challenges were overcome using secure connections across all integrations (Batch, Real-time, Synchronous) and encryption of all data at rest using Transparent Data Encryption, delivering effective connectivity between Oracle e-Business Suite and On-Premise Applications.

Version 1 ‘Applications Unlimited’ ‘as a Service’ gives Irish Life all the benefits of the SaaS model with their IaaS solution. Our ISO 20000 certified solution brings 24*7 ITIL based management to Oracle Cloud Platforms, combined with a service management layer and defined processes for Release Management, Incident, Problem and Change Management, proactive monitoring and a commitment to Continual Service Improvement. This all serves to deliver the highest levels of availability, scalability security, control and compliance demanded by Irish Life for their mission-critical Oracle E-Business Suite environment.