Challenges
Benenden® is a not-for-profit company in the UK that provides private health insurance. It has over 800,000 members, including employees of corporate schemes.
Ness was involved in the digitisation of Benenden’s legacy systems. The original applications were monolithic, making them difficult to maintain, update and deploy. They were developed in ASP MVC and had to communicate with many external systems. The goal was to improve quality, performance and scalability, while expanding the functionality provided to clients.
Cloud environment: Azure App Services, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Table Storage, Azure Application Gateway, Azure CDN, Azure SQL Server, Azure VPN.
Solution
Ness redesigned the applications into a service-oriented architecture, which allowed for more efficient interaction between systems. REST and stateless services were deployed and Single Sign-On was introduced for easier access. Applications were gradually migrated from monolithic services to microservices. Azure Table Storage was used to import and validate data and there was an optimization of legacy services that were dependent on newer applications, including SQL and code.
Results
The implementation has resulted in significant cost savings as Benenden now only pays for the resources it uses. Service scalability has improved, allowing multiple instances to be deployed during peak times. Application availability has increased and page load speeds have been improved with Azure CDN. All public applications have been optimized for responsive design. The entire development and testing process was modernized, resulting in more results with fewer people.
Technologies and tools used: ASP Web API, AngularJS / Angular 6, IdentityServer3, Umbraco CMS, NHibernate, Oracle, SQL Server, Selenium WebDriver, BDD/SpecFlow, TeamCity, Jenkins, Sonar, Octopus Deploy, ReSharper, JIRA, Bitbucket, BrowserStack.