Nomura Research Institute, Ltd. (NRI), a leading provider of consulting services and system solutions, and Sony Life Insurance Co., Ltd. (Sony Life Insurance) today announced that NRI has completed the development and operation of a portion of Sony Life Insurance’s Customer Center systems onto the public cloud. NRI will be managing operation of the public cloud environment, which will be hosted on Microsoft Azure (Azure).

NRI and Sony Life Insurance have maintained a professional relationship since 1996, when NRI originally developed their enterprise system. NRI has regularly updated the system since implementation and leveraged that experience and intimate knowledge of the system to migrate the infrastructure to Azure. NRI’s technologists engaged in the entire implementation process including system requirements, design, development, testing, implementation and ongoing operation and management.

By moving to Microsoft Azure public cloud environment with NRI, Sony Life Insurance was able to improve fault-tolerance and security while reducing operational burden and optimizing resources. 

The benefits of the new system infrastructure include:

·           Reducing operational burden by automating daily operations such as identification, notification and recovery of system failures with mPLAT^*1, NRI’s multi-cloud management platform. 

·           Maintaining security with a policy that does not allow any external access to manage customers’ information in a safe and cost-effective manner.

·        Minimizing cost and development period by standardizing server and operational environments as well as automating development processes to minimize the labor of designing servers and creating documents. 

·          Ensuring compliance to safety guidelines through NRI serving as audit agent to ensure the environment is compliant with the guidelines set by FISC (The Center for Financial Industry Information Systems^*2).

“Migrating infrastructure to Azure environment usually presents numbers of challenges especially from a security perspective,” said Akio Yamamoto, Senior Corporate Managing Director of NRI. “Our long-standing relationship with Sony Life Insurance made it possible for NRI to successfully move the infrastructure to Azure. We are happy to further strengthen this relationship with Sony Life Insurance while providing these services for other financial institution partners to assure their infrastructure remains up to date and are best optimized for the marketplace.”

In the future, NRI will explore the ways to further reduce the risk and cost of application maintenance by creating an environment where already developed application can be deployed in an automatic and safe manner as well as by using blue-green deployment.