"We can reduce costs and emissions with cloud solutions." 

With over 12,000 employees and seven million customers worldwide, the Helvetia Group is one of the five largest Swiss insurance companies. Since its foundation in 1858, Helvetia has set standards in security, customer proximity and convenience.

In 2018, the insurance company began implementing a multi-public cloud strategy. The company's aim was to migrate all systems at its main location in Switzerland to the cloud as a first step. In addition to cost efficiency, Helvetia hopes that the cloud strategy will enable it to act more flexibly and quickly on the market and create even better customer experiences with the help of artificial intelligence. Almost 90% of applications are currently in the cloud. Since the end of 2023, Helvetia has no longer operated its own data centres, but has moved practically everything to the public cloud. This puts it in a pioneering role among Swiss insurance companies "Cloud services enable us to automate business processes more quickly and easily, minimise errors and score points as an attractive employer with a modern working environment," says Raphael Graber, Head of Cloud Solutions at Helvetia.  

In 2019, the long-standing IT partner Swisscom recommended the Instance Scheduler to the insurance group. A software from AWS was available on the market at that time. "However, it was not mature enough and much more complex than Helvetia needed," explained Claude von Dach, Cloud Solution Architect at Swisscom. Therefore, a custom solution for the development and test systems was developed, precisely tailored to Helvetia’s needs. "It can be easily integrated into Helvetia’s processes and adapted to new requirements," explained Claude von Dach.

Within just three months, Swisscom's bespoke development was installed at Helvetia, and the go-live went smoothly. "Our goal was for the new software to be easy for around 300 employees to use, thereby achieving high acceptance," said Raphael Graber, Head of Cloud Solutions, Helvetia Group. With the help of the Instance Scheduler, predefined systems are automatically shut down in the evening and restarted in the morning. The solution is distributed as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and can be used in any AWS account and in any AWS application of Helvetia. 

While the technical implementation of the new software solution went smoothly, the so-called cultural change posed the greatest challenge. The goal of saving server performance was not entirely new to staff: For the sake of energy efficiency, the Helvetia Group had been organising competitions over Christmas/New Year for some time, encouraging teams to save as much energy as possible during this period. This involved dramatically reducing server performance. The team that was most energy-efficient received an award. 

What was new was that the servers of the development and test teams had to be automatically switched on and off daily. "Staff were used to having the servers always available," explains Raphael Graber. Therefore, the role of the Cloud Competence Centre was to demonstrate the significant economic and ecological benefits of not having all systems running around the clock. "Together with the application teams, we defined which systems were suitable for the Instance Scheduler," Graber explains. As Swisscom continued to expand the solution, a feature was added for RDS databases, enabling the manually restarted servers that had been automatically shut down. Graber notes, "This significantly increased acceptance among staff." 

Helvetia has now achieved its set goal, and the savings are impressive: The servers and databases of the test and development systems now run only 350 hours per month at the same workload for the teams, compared to 720 hours previously. This saves more than half the costs for these systems monthly. The CO₂ footprint has significantly decreased as a result. 

"Swisscom has once again proven to be a very competent, flexible, and reliable partner throughout the entire project," emphasises Raphael Graber. Claude von Dach adds, "Thanks to our experience with serverless products and automation in the public cloud, as well as our long-standing collaboration with the Helvetia Group, we were able to develop a simple and cost-effective solution that efficiently uses Helvetia's resources." 

 Another joint project is already in the pipeline: Helvetia is currently considering further scaling down the development systems so that they only run when actively in use. 

Helvetia is currently on its "journey in the cloud." "We want to increasingly use innovative services, including artificial intelligence, to provide an even better customer experience," explains Graber. The goal, according to Helvetia's vision, is to make customer interaction with Helvetia as simple and clear as possible.