The client is a home, auto, and business insurance provider located primarily in the US Midwest. Founded on principles of responsibility and integrity, the client has served its state and local communities for more than 125 years.
The client was an early adopter of web-based technologies, developing their first agent and employee portals in the early 2000’s. Though the application had been enhanced over the years, the architecture and hosting platforms were significantly outdated. This forced agents, employees, and clients to switch between Internet Explorer (IE) and modern web browsers to complete their tasks, including but not limited to:
Examples of day-to-day tasks
This workaround was incredibly cumbersome and inefficient. Moreover, Microsoft had recently announced it was ending support for IE, compounding the issue. This convergence of difficulties highlighted several pressing concerns for the client, namely the need to move users away from IE, and continued application security. More specifically, the application was hosted on servers ranging from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2016 and contained hundreds of code repositories. In addition, there was little documentation available, hardly any internal application knowledge, and no built-in test automation functionality.
The client determined they would need the assistance of a consulting partner to modernize their systems for modern browsers, to improve user experience, and align their application with continuous security updates.
The client turned to Planet Technology to modernize this application in a phased approach by providing the browser compatibility updates along with automated testing implementations initially and moving all applications on legacy servers to Windows Server 2019 hosted in Azure to provide the additional security offerings of TLS 1.2.
Planet Technology worked with the client’s numerous business units and information technology teams to achieve an overall understanding of the applications and perform the modernization over the course 18 months. During the process more than 90 code repositories were updated to support the modernization efforts.
Key Features
As a result of this engagement, the client now has a secure, modern browser supported agent and employee portal to facilitate daily operations.
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