Making a move: How migrating to Ubuntu saved a life insurance company 60% in costs

Balancing high performance operations against the need to reduce total operating costs is a classical dilemma faced by both large and small organisations. This dilemma becomes particularly important when you choose the foundation of your IT infrastructure: the operating system.

A recent case study by Tech Mahindra, the multinational IT services and consulting firm, details how their partnership with Canonical enabled them to shift the balance for a major Fortune 500 life insurance company.

The result was a successful migration toward a more efficient, modern and cost-effective technology stack, with Ubuntu at the centre of the solution.

Phased migration, from legacy Linux to Ubuntu

The insurance company, which offers annuities for retail investors and fixed income products, faced a challenging task: to find a Linux distribution compatible with their IBM Db2 database in addition to enterprise-grade support for Jboss EAP 24/7, a Java EE-based application server runtime platform.

At the time the company depended on running 140 physical servers hosting around 3,000 VMs on an outdated enterprise Linux distribution. The need to ensure security and optimal performance pushed the company towards two options: purchase expensive licences and upgrade to a newer version of the same Linux distribution, or migrate their workloads to a trusted new OS. Faced with prohibitive upgrade costs, the company started to explore alternative operating systems.

Recognising that Ubuntu was an ideal fit for the insurance company’s IT infrastructure due to its cost-effectiveness, Canonical and Tech Mahindra were engaged to enable the migration of IBM Db2 and JBoss EAP to 50 Ubuntu servers by the end of 2022.  The rest of the migration – comprising approximately 90 additional Ubuntu servers – is set to be completed in 2023. Ubuntu not only offered significantly better economics, but it also provided security, ease of use, a predictable release schedule and a consistent environment across the data centre and cloud.

Security and support with improved economics

To support the migration, the company chose Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure, now available as Ubuntu Pro (Infra-only). This comprehensive subscription provides extended security maintenance for 10 years for all Ubuntu LTS releases, as well as 24/7 support from Canonical. Ubuntu Pro also offers compliance with high-security standards such as Common Criteria and FIPS 140. 

Despite the scope of this offering, the cost of Ubuntu Pro was a fraction of the customer’s previous Linux provider. This enabled the insurer to reallocate saved funds to cover the cost of migration in addition to investment in other projects.

The end result was that Tech Mahindra enabled a cost benefit of over 60% by transitioning the customer from their existing commercial Linux environment to Ubuntu.

Future-ready

The move to Ubuntu has also laid the foundations for future innovation and investment. Canonical’s mission is to bring open source software to the widest audience, and this ambition extends beyond the scope of the Ubuntu operating system itself. The Ubuntu Universe Repository contains over 23,000 packages including critical applications and toolchains for app development, AI and machine learning, Internet of Things and cloud-native engineering. And as part of Ubuntu Pro, we’ve extended our security commitment beyond Ubuntu to cover this entire open source ecosystem.

Regardless of your use-case, or the size of your Ubuntu estate, Canonical is your home for trusted open source.

Ready to make the move?

Canonical’s customers range from the biggest tech brands to startups, governments and home users. To learn more about how we deliver trusted open source for everyone, get in touch.

• Read the full case study from Tech Mahindra
• Read more about Ubuntu Pro