In this article you will read about,

• what services ROLAND Rechtsschutzversicherung offers its customers,
• why the insurer switched from the private to the public cloud,
• and how the long-established company overcame the hurdles of regulation and database licensing together with its digitalization partner Telekom.

Trouble with building a house or claims for damages, disputes with tenants or landlords, disagreements after a traffic accident: legal disputes are not only stressful, they can often also be very costly. With their legal protection offers, insurance companies provide their policyholders with financial support in enforcing their claims in court and thus obtaining justice.

These are services that the ROLAND Group, headquartered in Cologne, has been providing for 75 years. The long-established company with around 1,200 employees offers classic legal protection. The company’s portfolio also includes accident cover and assistance services.  

Whether it's questions about rates or insurance coverage, or quick help in the event of a car breakdown – the optimal customer service is ROLAND's top priority for all of its services. This is one of the reasons why the insurance company decided to move to the public cloud in 2019. The switch to flexible resources was not only intended to increase the security of the IT infrastructure compared to the previous on-premises solution. The company also wanted to see an improvement in the performance of the core applications used by its call center staff. Likewise, the insurer wanted to respond better to fluctuations and peak loads in its day-to-day business with flexible public cloud solutions. And it wanted to do so cost-effectively at a good price-performance ratio. 

The insurer needed an experienced digitalization partner for its move to the cloud. That’s because the switch from the private cloud to a public cloud provider poses particular challenges for insurance companies like ROLAND: As a legal protection insurer, the company is subject to regulation by the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) and must adhere to strict compliance requirements. In addition, the legal protection expert uses database systems from Oracle. These are generally licensed for specified core computers in the company's own IT infrastructure and are not easily transferable to other IT solutions. 

The company found the right partner in Telekom and its Open Telekom Cloud offering. Thanks to its high security standards, the multiple-certified public cloud service already meets a large proportion of the regulatory requirements for security, data protection, and compliance, which the German regulator BaFin checks once a year for the legal protection division of ROLAND AG. Only a few additional regulatory requirements still had to be met. 

Together with Oracle, Telekom's digitalization experts also found a solution for the second hurdle: Individual bare metal servers in the public cloud received the appropriate licensing and the important databases could be migrated to the modern cloud infrastructure of Telekom's highly secure twin-core data center in Magdeburg/Biere. This offers ROLAND flexible capacities and a reliable, scalable infrastructure based on the open technology standard OpenStack. The secured twin-core servers provide additional security: The insurer's data and applications are located both on an active server and mirrored on a physically remote, passive server. This means that data and applications are stored in a geo-redundant and fail-safe manner.

"By moving to the cloud, we have taken a pioneering step that we can only recommend to other companies in our industry. Thanks to the trustworthy cooperation with Telekom, we have increased the security of our services, gained considerable flexibility, and, above all, significantly reduced our costs," says Oliver Schaber, Head of IT at ROLAND AG.

Specifically, the company has been running its core applications, including ICIS and RANA, in the Open Telekom Cloud’s secure data center since mid-2019. Thanks to the outsourcing to the cloud provider's infrastructure, users benefit from fast access and significantly better performance. This also pays off for the company’s customers, whose legal questions and concerns are handled quickly and effectively. With the cloud solutions, the company’s IT experts are spared having to spend so much time on routine tasks such as maintaining and operating applications in their own data center. This is a major advantage for the legal insurance company, because the team now contributes more to the company's actual value creation.

Thanks to the needs-based pay-as-you-go model, ROLAND only ever pays for those cloud services that the company actually uses. This allows the insurer to react flexibly to its business development at any time and to add or cancel server capacities or applications, even at short notice. Among other things, this opens up new opportunities for the company to use modern technologies, such as big data analysis of process data.

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