YF Life Insurance International, a fast-growing fintech company offering one-stop risk- and wealth-management consulting services, has selected HPE as its new partner to power the company’s digital transformation with HPE GreenLake. YF Life is the first insurance company in Hong Kong to use HPE GreenLake services.
YF Life aims to strengthen its online sales platforms, applications and fintech support systems so as to deliver a seamless user and financial-management experience to its policyholders, consultants and brokers, back-office staff, and especially to digital-native generations. YF Life is a member of publicly listed Yunfeng Financial Group Limited, whose major shareholders include Yunfeng Financial Holdings Limited and the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company.
YF Life selected HPE Synergy, a highly secured, composable software-defined compute offering, and HPE 3PAR StoreServ, an AI-enabled storage solution, to be delivered as-a-service via HPE GreenLake. YF Life leverages these technologies through HPE GreenLake to operate its applications and data on premises in a scalable, self-service model. It uses HPE GreenLake Central to gain visibility and ensure compliance with local regulations.
At the same time, YF Life’s IT team would now be able to provide service to its users in a faster and more cost-effective manner. Based on their own analysis, YF Life is expecting a 3-year return on investment for the infrastructure. HPE GreenLake would help shorten deployment times. In addition, HPE Synergy’s composable and software-defined capabilities would allow the application development teams at YF Life to develop new services and apps more quickly.
Security and Compliance
In Hong Kong, insurance is a highly regulated industry that handles a large amount of personal data. It increases the requirements for compliance with security and data sovereignty.
YF Life must comply with data sovereignty laws. That is, all its operational data and personal customer information must physically reside in Hong Kong. Considering the potential risks associated with storing sensitive data on a public cloud, YF Life turned to HPE GreenLake for their secured, flexible and on-premise as-a-service solution to manage its applications and data.
“We need direct control of the IT infrastructure, and the ability to design and enforce the company’s own policies, rather than depending on a cloud provider. A public cloud could not provide that assurance,” said Daryl Cheng, Senior Vice President, Management Information Systems, YF Life. “As a long-term, reliable IT partner, HPE provides the flexibility we need to scale as business demands change, but with control to manage and secure our data on premise. On top of that, HPE GreenLake helps us align with our company’s SUPER (Simple, User-friendly, Powerful, establish Ecosystem, Reliable) strategy as we undergo our digital transformation.”
YF Life selected HPE Synergy and HPE 3PAR StoreServ storage to enable faster app development on a software-defined data center platform. HPE Synergy and HPE 3PAR offer infrastructure for all kinds of workloads “at cloud-like speed and scale” in the company’s own data center. YF Life also plans to adopt DevOps in application development using containers, which HPE Synergy will help support by providing a platform to enable DevOps and infrastructure as code to scale faster.
“We are very pleased that HPE Synergy offers a single set of powerful and yet easy-to-use APIs,” added Mr. Cheng. “With these APIs, we can virtually do everything to the infrastructure to achieve our digital transformation.”
“Security, data sovereignty, and compliance are often top priorities of insurance companies holding huge volumes of personal data,” said Dr. Gabriel Leung, Managing Director Hong Kong & Macau, HPE. “In order to address these concerns, customers in the financial services sector are increasingly turning to HPE GreenLake to benefit from the agility and flexibility of the cloud, while also having the visibility and cost controls of an on-premise deployment. HPE is proud to be playing a critical role in the YF Life transformation at every level of the business. HPE’s unique edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service offerings provide YF Life with a strong platform to ‘own the future’ as a high tech, sustainable insurance company in Hong Kong, Macau, the Greater Bay Area, and beyond.”
Governance, Compliance, Visibility
To conclude, HPE GreenLake Cloud Services provide customers with a foundation to drive digital transformation through an elastic As-a-service platform that can run on-premises, at the edge, or in a colocation data center. HPE GreenLake would combine the simplicity and agility of the cloud with the governance, compliance, and visibility that comes with hybrid IT.
HPE GreenLake offers a range of cloud services including cloud services for compute, container management, data protection, HPC, machine learning operations, networking, SAP HANA, and storage, VDI, and VMs. The HPE GreenLake Cloud Services business is rapidly growing with now over $4 billion in total contract value, over 700 partners selling HPE GreenLake, and more than 1,000 customers in all industry sectors and sizes including Fortune 500 companies.