difference between guardian life and guardian anytime

In addition, Guardian has seen an increase in staff productivity and has enhanced its teams’ cloud skill sets. “We pay penalties to our customers when we have an outage, so we have realized positive financial ramifications from that stability,” says Giancaterino. “They can start building fixes without engaging other teams.” Guardian has also reduced outages by 30 percent. “Using Amazon EKS, our teams can address technical requests in near real time,” says Giancaterino. Previously, when customers sent requests to fix technical issues, each request would be added to a queue and backlogged for weeks or months. Instead of its teams spending time building and maintaining an on-premises infrastructure, they can now react quickly to customer feedback. Today, Guardian’s core systems for its group benefits and individual markets applications run using Amazon EKS, and new workloads are run as containers on Amazon EKS. As of July 2021, 123 of the company’s microservices were built using Launchpad, saving the company $400,000 per year.Īs Guardian started to increase its container capabilities, it expanded to Amazon EKS because of the integration flexibility. The architecture for Launchpad includes Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service that helps users deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications. The company built an internal service called Launchpad, which its developers use to spin up infrastructure. In Guardian’s efforts to adopt a cloud-first approach to building applications, the company began using container-based workloads to achieve elasticity, optimize cost savings, and decrease time to market. Increasing Agility and Staff Productivity Using Amazon EKS The success of using Amazon EC2 for the website prompted Guardian to migrate additional applications to the cloud and explore how it might use other AWS services to accelerate its digital transformation. Guardian first migrated its computing infrastructure to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. “That’s what pushed us to explore AWS and its automatic scaling solutions.” “We didn’t have the ability to scale up and down in real time based on customer demand within our on-premises data center,” says Jarret Giancaterino, second vice president of cloud platform services at Guardian. To accommodate fluctuating traffic volume on the website and meet customer demand, Guardian needed a computing infrastructure that would offer dynamic scaling. In 2016, Guardian began using AWS for its direct-to-consumer website,, where individuals can research and buy insurance products online without an agent. The company provides life, disability, dental, and other benefits to 29 million customers, who can purchase insurance individually or through their workplaces. In 2021, 5 years into its digital transformation, Guardian has further modernized its environment and runs 85 percent of its workloads on AWS and is focusing its future development on running new workloads as containers using Amazon EKS.įounded in 1860, Guardian is among the top 250 companies of the 2021 Fortune 500 and one of the largest mutual insurance companies in the world.

Using Amazon EKS, Guardian has achieved significant cost savings, an increase in employee productivity, and the agility to respond to customer demands in near real time. Shortly after beginning its journey to the cloud, the company recognized the benefits of using a container-based solution to reduce costs and improve efficiency.Ī key part of Guardian’s container-based architecture is Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which gives users the flexibility to start, run, and scale Kubernetes applications on AWS. The company chose to migrate its on-premises systems to the cloud using Amazon Web Services (AWS), closing its on-premises data center in 2018. In 2016, Guardian began a company-wide digital transformation to improve innovation, speed to market, and the customer experience. Mutual insurance provider Guardian Life Insurance Company of America (Guardian) wanted to deliver its growing list of products to customers even faster by going digital.

Difference between guardian life and guardian anytime