Willis Towers Watson taps into scalability with Microsoft Azure
Willis Towers Watson’s Insurance Consulting and Technology (ICT) unit provides specialist analytics capabilities to many of the world’s leading insurance providers. By migrating its on-premises databases to Microsoft Azure SQL Database, the company has been able to gain the flexibility to improve its services, meet demand peaks and provide its services to a wider audience at a lower cost.
The company initially began to reconsider its delivery methods in response to increasing demand among its customers for cloud migration. ON top of this, Willis Towers Watson operated over 80 on-premises instances of Microsoft SQL Server to store its client data and process analytics. With work coming in peaks and troughs, this meant a lot of resources were underutilized. In order to gain more efficiency and flexibility, the ICT unit migrated its entire SQL estate to the cloud with Azure.
Willis Towers Watson had enjoyed a long relationship with Microsoft as both customer and vendor, but its Azure Database Migration Service exceeded expectations, making the migration practically seamless for the company and with no downtime for customers.
Following the migration, the first noticeable benefit Willis Towers Watson saw was cost, as it now only paid for the SQL resources it consumes. Moving to the cloud has also given it the flexibility to scale databases according to demand, allowing it to easily meet ebbs and flows in its workloads. The migration has also enabled Willis Towers Watson to offer a more cost-efficient cloud-based service, enabling it to serve clients that may previously have been priced out.
This has seen the company begin to work with small and medium-sized businesses in fresh markets like Latin America and Asia Pacific that it couldn’t have previously reached. After the migration, the company was looking into further capabilities, such as AI and machine learning, and the ICT team said it expected to see the solutions impact other areas of Willis Towers Watson’s business.
