To cut business risk and enable future-facing services, Legal & General partnered with Elyzium to migrate the core applications underpinning its pensions business to the Microsoft Azure cloud. Tightly integrated with the company’s on-premises IBM Z® environment through IBM® Workload Automation, the new cloud solution boosts development efficiency by 30%, slashing time to market for new services.
Legal & General is one of the largest pension providers in the UK, with over one million retirement customers across its Retail and Institutional businesses.
Alex McArthur, Senior Project Manager at Legal & General Assurance (Pensions Management) Limited, confirms: “In recent years, we’ve expanded our customer base significantly. This growth has been driven by a range of factors, including UK legislation that requires all employers to automatically enroll their employees in a pension scheme, and pension risk transfers—bulk purchase annuities involving a defined benefit pension scheme entering into an insurance arrangement with specialist insurers like Legal & General.”
To operate its pensions business, Legal & General relies on its digital systems. The organization uses a set of applications—Asset and Liability Payment Services, or ALPS—to do everything from generating quotations and letters for customers to calculating the total value of each pension scheme. For decades, this system ran on-premises on the IBM Z platform.
McArthur explains: “As the years went by, it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, extend and scale ALPS to meet the evolving needs of the business. For 20 years, ALPS has successfully delivered for Legal & General pension customers, and we want to ensure the longevity of the service for decades to come.”
He continues: “Our ultimate goal is to transform ALPS into a modern ecosystem of loosely coupled services that offer the security, agility and resilience to meet our long-term business needs. As a first step on that journey, we decided to migrate to the Azure cloud.”
Moving to a modern cloud platform cuts time-to-market for new services
Mitigates the risk of downtime with robust disaster recovery capabilities
Apps run seamlessly in the cloud while leveraging batch services on IBM Z
After setting its sights on cloud, Legal & General looked for the optimal software platform to support ALPS on Azure. Following an in-depth proof of concept with one of its software development partners, the organization decided to deploy ALPS on Open Liberty running in a containerized environment based on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), with support delivered through a simplified subscription-based model from IBM.
“We determined that AKS was the optimal platform for a variety of reasons, including interoperability, cost-efficiency and speed of deployment,” recalls McArthur. “Similarly, we were confident that Open Liberty was the ideal successor to IBM WebSphere Application Server. With Open Liberty, we get all the advantages of the proven, open-source Open Liberty platform, backed by enterprise support from experts at IBM.”
Although ALPS would move to the cloud, the platform still needed the ability to interface with other batch workloads running on the mainframe. To ensure ALPS would run smoothly in the cloud, Legal & General looked for a cross-platform scheduling solution.
“In our mainframe environment, we use IBM Z Workload Scheduler to ensure that each of our jobs runs at the appropriate time,” says McArthur. “After considering our options, we determined that IBM Workload Automation was the best fit for our needs. As well as offering pre-built integrations straight out of the box, the solution is fully backwards compatible with IBM Z Workload Scheduler—enabling us to see both on-premises and cloud workloads from a single pane of glass. IBM Workload Automation also offers a highly flexible and transparent cost model, which allows us to track our spend directly in the solution.”
To deploy and configure IBM Workload Automation on Azure, Legal & General partnered with Elyzium, an IBM Business Partner and expert in the delivery of IBM Workload Automation solutions.
“For complex projects, I’m a great believer in calling in the experts—and Elyzium came highly recommended by IBM,” comments McArthur. “From the very beginning, it was clear that the Elyzium team had a great deal of experience with IBM Workload Automation and understood the solution on a deep level.”
Working with the Legal & General project team, Elyzium performed a thorough assessment of the company’s existing batch estate and mapped out the new job streams for IBM Workload Automation.
“Today, we run 72,000 jobs per year on IBM Workload Automation, alongside additional shadow jobs where necessary to address dependencies between batches and maintain interoperability with our mainframe environment,” says McArthur.
Following a series of deployments in development and pre-production environments, Legal & General validated that the new solution delivered the reliability and performance required for production operations. Today, the company runs its ALPS application stack on Open Liberty on AKS.
With its ALPS applications running on a security-rich, future-ready platform, Legal & General can combine the reliability of the mainframe with the flexibility of the cloud. Next, the organization will begin splitting ALPS into its individual components, streamlining development.
“Moving ALPS to the cloud will enable us to componentize and enhance the digital services that underpin our pensions business,” states McArthur. “For our development and test teams, moving to the cloud will bring major advantages around speed and efficiency. By migrating ALPS to Azure—powered by AKS and IBM Workload Automation—we estimate that we’ve improved our ability to implement functional changes by 30%.”
The first service that Legal & General plans to separate from ALPS is My Account—a digital portal that enables customers to view information about their pensions from an online dashboard.
McArthur comments: “We are laying the foundation for a wide range of new customer-facing services as well as back-office efficiency improvements. For example, we currently handle the generation and printing of customer communications in house. By decoupling this functionality from ALPS, we’ll have the freedom to partner with these services, reducing our costs and freeing the business to focus on core competencies.”
Crucially, moving ALPS to a modern, cloud-based platform empowers Legal & General to protect its critical systems by combining development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) methodologies with robust data protection capabilities.
“Today, we can comfortably meet our four-hour RTO for ALPS, which helps us to ensure that we can rapidly recover our systems in a disaster scenario,” confirms McArthur. “Our enhanced data protection and information security capabilities are very helpful in winning new business. Demonstrating to pension trustees that we can protect their members’ data is crucial.”
Looking to the future, Legal & General is confident that it has the robust infrastructure platform it needs to continue to grow its business.
“Modern tools and methodologies are helpful, but ultimately it’s not an agile manifesto that gets things done—it’s people,” concludes McArthur. “The Elyzium team was always willing to do what was necessary to keep our modernization effort on track. As we embark on the next phase of the project, we know we have the right people, partnerships and technology to help us succeed.”
Established in 1836, Legal & General (link resides outside of ibm.com) is one of the UK’s leading financial services groups and a major global investor, with over GBP 1.2 trillion in total assets under management. Headquartered in London, England, the company is a leading international player in pension risk transfer, in UK and US life insurance, and in UK workplace pensions and retirement income.
Established in 1998, Elyzium (link resides outside of ibm.com) is an IBM Business Partner dedicated to delivering top-quality professional services and enterprise systems management solutions built on IBM software. Elyzium aims to help all organizations realize the benefits of workload automation, irrespective of industry, size, or skilled internal resource, in a straightforward, cost effective, and efficient manner.
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