A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Pierre Braganza, the Chief Enterprise Architect at CNA Insurance, to see how he plans to build the “world’s smartest underwriting company.” Listen to the discussion above. The goal here is to deliver strategic insights, provide tips and share best practices from senior IT execs that are driving digital transformation.
In our inaugural conversation with Dr. Braganza, we go in-depth to outline how CNA is adopting a cloud-first approach to accelerate IT modernization. At a high level, Dr. Braganza offers a methodology that leverages existing IT resources and systems versus the more common lift and shift or rip and replace approach. This is a cloud journey that balances business outcomes with IT modernization needs, including operational support, security, and technology. Dr. Braganza’s approach is informed by his commitment to serving key business drivers and CNA’s customers. His approach touches all facets of the evolving insurance experience while ensuring the ongoing improvement of infrastructure stability, resiliency, security, and supportability.
Here are six key takeaways from our conversation with Dr. Braganza.
- Understand your entire stack, what the requirements are (Hyperscale vs SaaS vs traditional application needs), and where these workloads will run best.
- Reimagine lift and shift! Tremendous cost and complexity are created during the lift and shift process, with minimal value back to the business. This money and time are better invested into a foundational infrastructure upgrade across the entire landscape.
- In IT, the core business drivers can be well served by accelerating modernization and simplification of the ecosystem. This empowers the infrastructure to better serve the business and its customers.
- It is not about eliminating the debt; it’s about understanding it and managing it. Set a timeline for modernization and optimization that tackles the problem incrementally, but always with the underlying intent to modernize and optimize the workloads on a platform that best suits their needs.
- The budget prioritization needs to push beyond architecture vision and road-mapping needs and be inclusive of the fundamentals that are absolutely required. If the basic infrastructure services get ignored, it will impede cloud adoption process while adding additional complexity and costs.
- Remember this: a perfect architecture that takes too long is too late. Think strategically, think big, and provide incremental real value along the way.
These highlights from our first podcast episode will be followed by additional interviews with thought leaders from financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and tech industry through the remainder of 2022. Given that cloud is here to stay, we are leveraging this platform to share relevant conversations and insights in each industry vertical. We hope you find some actionable intelligence and be sure to reach out if you have questions
We’re here to help every company develop a multi-cloud strategy that allows you to Cloud Different™, which will ensure that your organization delivers all the promised business benefits of the cloud.
