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Case study

The challenge

Talcott Resolution built its century-old life insurance and annuities business on core values of stability and trust. When its former parent sold the unit in 2018, the new company sought to pair its core values with a modern IT infrastructure. Talcott had just 20 months to stand up its new organization, including migration of its production portfolio—100 custom applications and 50 databases—from its former parent’s data center to the cloud, and to rebrand its website. It prioritized zero disruption for its business functions and customers.

Our approach

Among Talcott’s first actions as a new standalone company was development of a detailed plan for strategic growth. It planned to expand its business footprint through mergers and acquisitions and growth of its third-party administrator service.

To make it happen, Talcott needed to modernize its IT infrastructure. Key requirements included:

  • Agile, secure and scalable IT environment to replace the legacy system hosted in its former parent’s on-premises environment
  • Migration of its extensive production portfolio of custom applications and databases to the cloud with minimal downtime

Our team’s long-term association with the parent company made us a natural partner for Talcott’s cloud migration and rebranding. We had a full view of Talcott’s IT landscape and deep expertise in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which Talcott had selected based on its experience with Oracle Exadata Database.

A critical factor in the engagement was the complex timing of the cutover. It had to occur when production was light, and it also had to follow the timing of the stock market.

Dynamic scaling and provisioning bring major improvements

The IT cutover proceeded with zero interruptions, enabling the new company to maintain its focus on uninterrupted business functionality and customer service. The new infrastructure’s ability to scale capacity dynamically and to provision on the fly is the single biggest benefit from cloud. In the company’s legacy environment, it took six to eight weeks to stand up a new server. Now, scripting and infrastructure as code is completed within a day or two, and then the new server goes live.

As a result of the cloud platform’s flexibility, Talcott Resolution was able to jumpstart its business with new agility and efficiencies. By completing its divestiture and rebranding ahead of schedule, the company avoided the potential multimillion-dollar costs outlined in its transition services agreement (TSA).

25%

reduction in CapEx and OpEx

Dramatic reduction

in provisioning of new servers, now in minutes rather than months

20% savings

in people, process and technology due to Cognizant’s solution accelerators