Venerable company shuts down its owned and operated data centers and moves majority of workloads to AWS.

November 28, 2018

3 Min Read

SEATTLE -- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced that The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America (Guardian) has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider, and is moving the majority of its workloads to AWS for greater agility, reliability, and functionality. The 158-year-old mutual insurance company continues to migrate production workloads to AWS, including mission-critical functions such as data analytics platforms, customer portals, and direct-to-consumer services, and is closing its Guardian owned and operated data centers. By moving to AWS, Guardian has reduced its IT operating costs and is using AWS for its acquisition strategy, migrating newly acquired businesses to the cloud to shed legacy infrastructure and technical debt.

Guardian took a deliberate approach to its cloud migration, moving targeted production workloads to AWS first. The organization then worked with AWS to create an enterprise readiness program that would allow for a smooth transition from on-premises to the cloud, and provide a training facility for employees to develop advanced digital capabilities faster than ever before. AWS delivered hands-on support and dedicated resources who were deeply steeped in industry-specific challenges, and helped to establish Guardian’s best practices for security in the cloud. The success of these initial migrations to AWS and the ability to train its workforce using this program gave Guardian the confidence necessary to accelerate its move to the world’s leading cloud. Guardian now relies on AWS’s fault-tolerant, secure infrastructure, and is prototyping and developing new applications using AWS’s breadth of functionality, including compute, database, analytics, and machine learning services. Guardian built a data lake on AWS and Amazon EMR to support its anticipated data growth and analytics strategy. Additionally, Guardian is actively evaluating Amazon SageMaker—a fully-managed machine learning service—to gain insights into critical business functions such as customer analytics, and fraud detection.

“AWS has helped Guardian get ahead of insurance industry disruption driven by new technology and changing customer expectations, and enabled us to innovate and provide services how, when and where our customers prefer,” said Dean Del Vecchio, Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer, and Head of Enterprise Shared Services at Guardian. “AWS’s reliable, secure and proven infrastructure lets us scale quickly and access industry-leading services to test and deploy new technologies that delight our customers while protecting our assets in the cloud.”

“Companies across the financial services industry, like Guardian, are turning to AWS for the reliability, functionality, scalability, and security that often exceed the capabilities of on-premises data centers,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. “Guardian has been a trusted insurance company for more than 150 years, withstanding the test of time and embracing new technological advances to provide services that deliver financial confidence to customers. We look forward to continuing our work with Guardian as they move to AWS, closing the last of their data centers by the end of this year and looking ahead at ways they can leverage our services, including machine learning and analytics, to continue to evolve their business.”

Amazon Web Services Inc.

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