Svedea's Journey to Modernization and a Progressive Development Culture with APaaS

In Brief:

• Redeploy implemented APaaS at Svedea and transitioned their IT to a controlled, scalable Azure environment without compromising governance or financial oversight.
• Implementing APaaS facilitated a cultural shift at Svedea, promoting agile DevOps practices. This shift enabled Svedea's IT teams to innovate more effectively, breaking down operational silos and fostering cross-departmental collaboration.
• As a result, Svedea could enhance its cloud utilization, particularly for their third-party insurance resellers and public website cloud migration.

The Challenge

Being at the forefront of the Insurance industry meant that Svedea confronted the imminent need for IT modernization. Despite a forward-thinking IT team, their advancement was stifled by outdated infrastructure and unstructured Azure practices that led to shadow IT operations. A clear, governed Azure use was crucial for Svedea—to avoid governance and financial obstacles and to enable a cultural shift towards agile and innovative DevOps practices. This shift was essential for Svedea to fully harness cloud capabilities for their third-party insurance resellers and their public website's cloud migration.

– We were in dire need of shifting focus from foundational IT construction to genuine innovation, states Eric Wiklund, Infrastructure Specialist at Svedea

It was time for Redeploy to bring expertise and implement a Ready-to-Run solution to kick-start and free up resources within Svedea's IT department.

The Solution

We implemented our Azure Platform as a Service (APaaS) and provided Svedea with the necessary tools for a seamless and governed transition to Azure, striking a perfect balance between cost efficiency, developer freedom, and security. With the solution came policy-driven governance, granting Svedea's team the freedom to innovate while management maintained essential controls – a developer platform was in place.  

By providing network connectivity and infrastructure with APaaS, Svedea could reduce additional workloads from departmental teams, allowing them to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure.  

Moreover, with the new platform, Svedea could quickly deploy Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) to streamline collaborations with third-party vendors and move them from traditional on-premises setups to a more agile cloud-based service model.

"Redeploy's APaaS solution has enabled us to maintain control over our teams and initiate this culture change. With this platform, teams can request resources to build solutions themselves, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive – things are happening, and quickly!"  – Anders Lidgren, CIO Svedea

As part of Svedea's transformation, we arranged a structured series of workshops focusing primarily on the technical aspects of their new Azure landing zones. While these workshops leaned heavily on technology, they were indispensable in ensuring that Svedea comprehended what we were building and how to benefit from it. They were the starting point of a more long-term cultural evolution towards agile DevOps practices.

The Results

For Svedea, APaaS became the cornerstone of an IT renaissance that spurred a culture of empowerment, innovation, and swift progression toward a future-proof enterprise. It bridged the divide between infrastructure, web, and analytics, fostering a collaborative environment ripe for innovation. It gave the whole IT section of Svedea an improved understanding of Azure, allowing them to manage resources effectively while aligning with business objectives.

– Svedea has gained a better understanding of operations by setting up APaaS. They can extend these capabilities to their operations without deep-diving into the complexities of Azure. Consequently, IT can focus on assisting the business in developing robust solutions, says Lars Åkerlund, key point contact and Product Lead at Redeploy Run.

The new Cloud Platform paved the way for an accelerated innovation pipeline. Now, just after the implementation, they can start implementing a data platform (together with our sister company, Reinsight) and explore AI technologies, placing them at the forefront of technological advancement.