UniSuper to hone in on personalised member experiences

UniSuper has completed a cloud migration program, giving it the agility to meet future business demands and to support more personalised experiences for customers.

The industry super fund had already moved 60 percent of workloads shift to the cloud by June under a wider digital transformation.

“I'm pleased to say it’s complete. We are 100 percent in the cloud now, which is a fantastic result,” UniSuper’s head of architecture Sam Cooper told iTnews.

He said the project is “something we're really proud of” with the team “putting in a lot of hard work to get us to this point.”

For the cloud move, UniSuper used the Google VMware Engine (GCVE) managed service and partner Kasna to assist with the migration.

With the shift now complete, Cooper said the organisation "now has the agility to meet business demand if it changes quickly.”

Cooper pointed to UniSuper’s merger with Australian Catholic Super last year, which highlighted the companies' need for an upgraded infrastructure.

“If an opportunity like that presents itself again, we can respond really quickly, without having to order in hardware," he said.

“If there's organic growth [such as] some sort of campaign or targeting a particular member segment or something like that that means we need to scale quickly again, we can do that.

“If there's different projects that need to be spun up quickly, we can respond to that demand.

"I think that's a real competitive advantage in today's market”.

Cooper said completion of the work means UniSuper “will have now the ability to invest our resources into value-add work… giving back to member-focused initiatives, those types of things."

“It really opens up the door to really line up behind what we're here for, and that that's to provide great retirement outcomes to members, so that's the piece that we're excited about.

“We've got a real focus as an organisation on offering more personalised experiences to our members, so the next few years is really targeted around how do we bring that to life?

He saw the cloud migration as successful due to “a few key themes” including collaboration efforts with integration partner Kasna.

“We had excellent collaboration between our integration partner in Kasna, and Google and UniSuper,” Cooper said.

“I think the second piece was we took a really risk based approach to planning out the project. We didn't opt for a big bang.”

He said the team “was really, really careful around how we planned things, and with contingency planning”.

Transparency around project movements also played its part, with Cooper stating there was “great buy-in” from the business leaders, adding to the success of the initial project.

The migration was performed in such a way as to " cause the least amount of disruption to the organisation".

“We really took a risk-based approach to planning out the migration and we broke it up into what we call migration waves," Cooper said.

“We did that so that we could contain what we moved and make sure that it was up and working properly, before we moved on to the next migration wave.

“That was the approach we took; we had a lot of contingency planning around different scenarios that would unfold, and I think that held us in really good stead in terms of being able to continue to progress.”

Application dependencies played a role in the migration planning, with Cooper stating that understanding the order of apps to be migrated was important.

The team are already seen the benefits of the move onto Google Cloud, with people “really excited about what opportunities this opens up moving forward for them.”

Cooper added it can be “hard to motivate people” when the work revolves largely maintaining legacy platforms, however now staff “can focus on really doing things that are adding value back into our membership group.”

Results seen from the shift to cloud seen so far consist of performance improvements in key systems.

“We're able to benefit from the security capability that Google has now at scale as well," Cooper said.

“The team members are really motivated by being able to work on modern technology and being able to do things that excite them and motivate them and they're able to learn new skills.”

Meanwhile, old platforms are set to be decommissioned “before Christmas” with the process taking place at the moment and will be “completely erased of all information” and removed from data centres.