Case Study
Avant Mutual’s
Legacy Application Modernisation

How DevOps Services assisted Avant Mutual’s Legacy Application Mondernisation Strategy

With a history spanning more than 125 years, Avant Mutual is Australia’s leading provider of medical indemnity insurance. Representing over 78,000 medical students and health practitioners, Avant Mutual has been a prominent provider for the industry since 1893, starting with just a small group of doctors.

The organisation continues to scale new heights, establishing its law firm in 2009 and acquiring Doctors’ Health Fund in 2012. Since then, it’s also grown and acquired more companies, enabling engagement with other areas of medical defence for doctors and medical students.

Rapid expansion and acquisitions made a review of Avant Mutual’s business applications and systems a priority.  But with more than 40 legacy applications sitting on old servers, they needed a tailored and unique solution to modernise legacay business applications and take advantage of moving to the cloud. There were challenges with legacy business application authentication and logging, which saw DevOps Services develop centralised logging and a sophisticated solution to handle legacy Windows authentication. Using the latest cloud technology and containerisation to accelerate their transformation goals, the team at DevOps Services planned this transition to the modern cloud platform with an attention to detail that ensured it was a success.

“Digital transformation is a huge undertaking. The pandemic has made almost every business in Australia, and globally, realise that we need to do things better – automation is the future of business. And there’s a realisation that digital investments have slipped over the last five years, particularly in business applications in large organisations.”

 Richard Angus, Director, DevOps Services

Avant Mutual’s cloud migration goals demanded a specific skill set. And while the organisation’s IT teams included capable developers, their technical skills and knowledge benefited from having the DevOps Service team help them identify and implement modern cloud-based solutions.

By partnering with Microsoft Partner DevOps Services, Avant Mutual was able to extend its capabilities, increase its delivery speed and achieve strategic goals faster through containerisation and automation.

Fast growth requires quick adaptation

Avant Mutual’s objective was to implement a new digital environment where processes and application deployment were as easy and automated as possible. With so many legacy applications to consider, the project scope was considerable.

“We’ve seen a challenge with large organisations in moving towards the cloud because they do have a lot of legacy systems and it’s a big job to update them. But it comes to a point where they can’t afford not to upgrade.”

 Roger Harwood, Director, DevOps Services

In the beginning, Avant Mutual worked with a SaaS company to help make their main application SaaS-based. However, everyone soon realised that the complexity of the legacy systems meant a specialist team was required if Avant Mutual were going to reach their broader legacy business application mondernisation and cloud adoption goals.

“DevOps Services came on board at the beginning of 2022. Their guidance has meant the change management process has been manageable for our team. We’ve felt supported every step of the way, and will continue to until the full transition is complete.”

Shane Ross, Head of Infrastructure, Avant Mutual

So Avant Mutual began searching for a knowledgeable DevOps consulting services provider that could help fast-track their transition to moderninse business applications and adopt cloud platforms.

Improved efficiency with containerisation solutions

Avant Mutual’s Head of Infrastructure, Shane Ross, was searching for proven expertise in modernising legacy business applications when he found DevOps Services.

“I looked at all the work they’d been doing and saw that they had the required skill sets we were missing,” Shane says. “We wanted our applications containerised because I knew that would speed things up. But we also wanted the containers to be built and delivered using Azure DevOps Pipelines in a fully automated way.”

Containerisation promotes strong security because each application is isolated from the host server and from each other, meaning security functions continue running even during software updates. It also allows Avant Mutual to choose their preferred cloud provider and easily change to another provider in the future if they wish. Other benefits of containerisation include its high scalability, pipeline management and the ease in which processes of deployment and configuration can be sped up.

Once they completed their assessment of Avant Mutual’s current systems, DevOps Services was able to deliver clear, tailored advice on how to proceed.

“DevOps Services helped us understand where we were at with our systems,” Shane says. “We had a few challenges in the way we originally approached it. DevOps Services came in and were able to help us automate sophisticated processes thanks to their broad skill set.”

With the process of standardisation and automation underway, Avant Mutual employees are already benefiting from the reduced administrative load. “Work is easier to get done, which makes for happy employees,” Shane says.

Implementing strategies for long-term success

DevOps Services’ first priority was to help Avant Mutual automate complex legacy business application delivery pipelines to improve efficiencies.

“Having DevOps Services come on board has helped save us a lot of time, money and effort.”

Shane Ross, Head of Infrastructure, Avant Mutual

With DevOps Services’ guidance, Avant Mutual can look forward to expanding its team’s capabilities and speed of service delivery. Productivity will increase thanks to automation, and employees will have more time to concentrate on progressing the organisation’s main goals. Utilising the benefits of containerisation, DevOps Services were able to deliver a solution that is more cost effective, scalable, secure and robust.

“Avant Mutual leveraged our experience and knowledge to accelerate their legacy application modernisation and get a fast outcome. They were time-poor and didn’t have the resources to do the necessary implementation themselves. So they engaged us as an external expert to overcome those challenges.”

Roger Harwood, Director, DevOps Services

Thanks to its partnership with DevOps Services, Avant Mutual is now ready and able to adapt quickly to new organisational challenges as they occur.

Progression and future-proofing

Shane views DevOps Services as a partner in their growth going forward.

“We’ve adopted a hybrid approach where DevOps Services is a technology partner with our business, but they’ve also shared some of their skill set with our teams so that we can maintain our systems internally into the future. This way, there’s ongoing progression.”

Shane Ross, Head of Infrastructure, Avant Mutual

Avant Mutal continues to work closely with DevOps Services on automation strategies to drive business performance. And the knowledge that’s been shared internally will support long-term DevOps adaptation and improvement within the organisation.

Cloud-enabled digital transformation made easy

For businesses looking to accomplish their tech transformation goals, DevOps Services can help.

Whether it’s modernising legacy systems and processes, optimising workflows or strengthening security, our expert team can devise and implement end-to-end IT strategies with a range of cloud technologies.

We are a trusted Microsoft Partner known for producing innovative ideas, developing modern deployment strategies and designing high-quality, scalable solutions.

Elevate your IT capabilities with DevOps Services

Contact us today – together we’ll make a powerful team.