- Hello, and welcome to community chats.
I'm Aley Hammer and today we're joined with Craig Kimball,
the CIO of MLC Life.
Craig, welcome to the show.
Can you start by telling our audience
a little bit about MLC Life?
- Yeah, of course, thanks very much.
So we are one of the oldest
life insurance businesses in Australia.
We're over 130 years old.
We're owned by Nippon Life
and we're a dedicated life insurance business.
- And Craig, can you share with us why you chose to invest
in the cloud and in particular AWS?
- Well, we believed that by working with AWS
and leveraging VMC technologies,
we could achieve three really key objectives.
So, insource our infrastructure operations.
So, create an internal cloud capability
that would set us up well for the future.
We could migrate to the cloud rapidly
and along the way we'd also reduce the cost
of our infrastructure operations quite significantly.
It's a pretty bold objective.
We had good partners though.
And the reason we're doing it is because we want to provide
the best digital experience insurance.
And the migration out of our data centers
is really important to enable that.
So given our recent history, our technology is very new
and that makes us pretty unique in the insurance business.
And our team are really excited about that.
But we needed to set ourselves free from the constraints
of having a physical data center to worry about
and get better access to the cloud technologies
that are available these days
And to get the best out of our modern capabilities,
we needed to set out on that path to cloud.
And the partnership between us and VMC and AWS
was a real enabler.
And when all three of those teams came together as they did,
it became a real accelerator as well.
- Well, it's commendable that your leadership thought
to take on this bold objective
and actually achieve it
with the help of some great partners, as you mentioned.
And I think it definitely sets you apart
from many of the other insurance companies,
which is really impressive.
And Craig, can you share an example
of how moving to the cloud has been beneficial
to not just MLC Life, but also your customers?
- Yeah, so we have reduced our infra operating cost by 40%.
That's a significant saving.
And it frees up a lot of investment.
We can refocus on those customer experiences
and more digitization.
An actual example of cloud technologies recently
was auto healing.
So a blip and the system self-healed
because it was in the cloud.
So seamless experience for our customers.
And that's the kind of capability we're chasing.
- I mean, those are phenomenal cost savings.
40% is absolutely insane.
Congratulations.
And Craig MLC recently underwent
an incredibly successful migration project
where you managed to migrate hundreds of workloads
in a very short time.
So firstly, as I said, congrats.
But secondly, can you share with our audience
why you think your team was so successful
and also if you had your time again,
is there anything you would change?
- (Craig laughing)
The team did do an amazing job
and honestly, because of that, I wouldn't change too much.
We've taken a lot of time to craft expert teams within MLC
over the last 12 months.
And we've melded together the loyalty and deep knowledge
of the tech professionals that we had
with expert new talent we brought in.
For example, experts in cloud technologies.
And we believe in building our own capability,
investing in our people
and in the value of long running teams
that are aligned to a clear purpose.
And that belief's created a really special place to work.
So I think it's a mix of culture capability, passion
and mindset that really got this to go as well as it did.
There was just really good leadership,
really great teamwork.
It was really exciting to see.
- That's awesome.
Craig, to round off this interview,
what does the future hold for MLC Life
and what are you most excited about
that will help enhance your presence in the cloud,
but also again, your customer experience?
- Yeah, I'm really excited about how the technology we have
can support our customers.
So looking into the future,
we're all really excited about how we can take advantage
of the elastic nature of the cloud.
Infrastructure is just not a constraint for us anymore.
We're now more confident than ever
that we can speed up customer outcomes
through increasing digitization.
We can enhance our processing with improved data
and AI capabilities.
We can better enable our business
with the technologies that we can now get to
via ecosystems like the AWS marketplace.
So we are set up really well now for the future.
And I think we've got a good path ahead of us now.
- 100%.
I mean, MLC is pretty much the poster child
for you know, a great migration project.
So well done, congratulations. - Thank you.
- We love partnering with you.
And if anyone has any questions,
please pop them in the comments section below
and we'll get back to you.
Thanks so much, Craig.
- No worries, thank you very much.