Zen Helps Westfield Health Migrate to Boost Reliability and Security Using AWS
Sector: Public
Use Case: Security for compliance
Zen Services: Migrate to Boost Reliability and Security Using AWS
Westfield Health
Founded in 1919, Westfield Health, an award-winning health and wellbeing provider, boasts over 500 employees. With a mission to make a healthy difference, they partnered with AWS Partner Zen to migrate their insurance platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS). This move aimed to enhance reliability, developer efficiency, and security compliance
Migrating to Improve Reliability and Encourage Innovation
Westfield’s IT team managed an increasingly unreliable insurance platform requiring extensive maintenance. "Our small team was constantly firefighting issues, often working weekends and nights," says Fran Gledhill, head of IT operations. This strain impacted their availability during regular hours. In the highly regulated insurance industry, Westfield needed to transform its infrastructure to maintain compliance with regulations like the EU's GDPR and standards like ISO 27001 and ISO 9001. "While not at immediate risk, we recognized future regulatory risks if we didn’t act," says Julian Chance, director of operations.After a tender process, Westfield Health partnered with AWS Partner Zen to migrate most systems to AWS, decommissioning its data centers.
Migration From Aging Data Centers to AWS:
Zen worked closely with Westfield’s technical team to design the new AWS infrastructure and provide training to help the migration run as smoothly as possible. “Our IT team and Zen talk to each other all the time—they share documents and I can monitor the progress without having to chase anyone,” says Gledhill. “Our in-house expertise has increased massively over the past year, and much of that is due to working alongside Zen.”
Dividing the project into eight phases made it easy to communicate progress with Westfield’s senior management team. “It’s difficult explaining to the business teams what is happening in a language they understand,” says Gledhill. “I can tell them the admin document repo has been migrated, but they have no idea what that means, so instead I can just say we have completed phase four and have moved on to phase five.”
The project kicked off in January 2023 with Zen using the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), which provides tools to reduce costs while automating and accelerating the migration. Zen migrated Westfield’s databases and applications to AWS, largely using services such as AWS Application Migration Service and AWS DataSync to accelerate the process.
In addition, the adoption of services such as AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager, AWS Backup and Amazon CloudWatch enabled Westfield to retire legacy systems and reduce operational overhead, while improving their capabilities. AWS Lambda is also being used to automate several key activities, improving reliability and performance in a cost effective way.
Westfield Health’s migration to a cloud infrastructure is now almost complete and the company is already starting to see some tangible benefits. In addition to gaining improved reliability, Westfield can now understand its precise costs even for small test projects. “Using AWS, our whole system is more stable and there are no more hidden costs—we only pay for what we use,” says Gledhill. “Previously, we had a massive data center bill and just accepted it, but now we will have complete transparency and know exactly what every element of every project costs us
Improved Reliability, Productivity, and Security
Improved Reliability, Productivity, and Security Gledhill says the scalability and availability of Westfield’s infrastructure has already helped the software development team be more productive and efficient. The company’s ability to respond quickly to business demand has recently seen the launch of a new application to support its customers, with the initial supporting cloud infrastructure created over a few days.
Westfield’s new cloud infrastructure is the foundation for its business and the company plans to continue working with Zen to grow the business. “We are starting to see some benefits, but we have plenty more to do,” says Chance. “Zen has proven it’s not here to just sell us stuff and get out—we have a fruitful relationship that is going to continue for some time.”
