Case study: Suncorp Group uses cloud to improve customer service

Financial institution Suncorp Group has been on a cloud journey since 2013, and they’re currently on the tail end of this journey to migrate the remainder of their workloads to the public cloud.

Charles Pizzato, executive general manager of infrastructure, technology and transformation at Suncorp Group discusses with Digital Nation how this cloud migration has enabled the company to deliver software more rapidly than ever before.

Pizzato said this cloud migration has allowed Suncorp Group to take advantage of various innovation from providers like Red Hat and other native cloud providers and adopt that from the broader ecosystem.

“That's quite important in this day and age, especially with the strategic nature of fintechs and insurtechs, in the way that they're able to provide services and get into markets that they've never been able to much more rapidly in the past,” he explained.  

This migration has allowed Suncorp Group to move away from traditional server-based architectures to more API-based microservices architectures.

Pizzato said this has given the organisation an “enormous amount of flexibility and scalability”.

“[Cloud migration brings] a different way of thinking about how we deploy software. It comes back to that underlying theme around how we are able to more effectively deliver services to our customers,” he said.

Implementing Red Hat has given the technology teams at Suncorp Group an easier way to work, Pizzato said.

“Development teams love that ability to be able to self-service infrastructure not fall through traditional procurement cycles and trails to get things done. Being able to just operate at their own pace.

“Clearly, for the business, there's a cost element to this as well and being able to reduce the cost of deploying services, which is ultimately very important for us as an infrastructure team and a technology team in terms of lowering the cost to serve for our customers,” he explained.

Suncorp has plans to stop using data centres by the end of 2023.

“The big focus to me is, is around what I'm going to do over the next four months, which is a big flag we've put on the hill that is that we will not have any leased or owned data centres by the end of next calendar year. That's a pretty big marker for us,” he explained.

“We've obviously, we're at the tail end of our cloud migration or cloud strategy having run for many years. But, getting to what I call ‘done done’ is something that is often the hardest thing.”

He ended, “My key goal and where Red Hat will be helping us play a role over the next 12 months is achieving that outcome and a big part of that is around our use of OpenShift.”