Europ Assistance had its SQL Server environment analysed by Kohera during a five-day Proof of Concept at the end of 2018. Kohera experts investigated the possibilities to migrate the environment to Microsoft Azure with the Data Migration Assistant of Microsoft. During the POC it seemed that a migration would be quite beneficial, provided a few minor adjustments. Given that Kohera was the only Belux Microsoft Partner involved in the preview version of the Managed Instance, resulting in them having all the required expertise in the tea, a migration would also be straightforward.
Managed Instance ensures that Europ Assistance’ SQL Server environment operates in a fully managed Azure environment in the cloud, allowing patches, updates, backups, etc. to be implemented automatically. “This enables us to reduce 50% of our SQL maintenance costs!”, says Michel Kennis. “Kohera supports our long-term vision to take our current IT infrastructure and evolve toward a PaaS environment in Microsoft Azure. Thanks to Managed Instance that migration is perfectly feasible, given a few minor modifications.
Lightning-fast reports, integration and innovation
The new application saves Europ Assistance lots of time. The organisation has more complete data now, but generating a report requires less work. Reporting and integrating data from partners can be done in an instant. ‘Everything used to be done manually in Excel, which could take anything from two hours to two days. But now we can make reports with a single click,’ explains Michel Kennis. ‘Our BI architecture is being used for operational integrations, too. For example, one of our partners, a bank, used to process all Europ Assistance contracts via its own systems, which were only loaded into our applications later on. But now it has direct access to our extranet so this extra step is no longer necessary. The BI environment has a crucial role in the sending and receiving of data. This complex integration project was achieved in the space of just three months, a success that would probably have taken twice as long without the BI environment.’
The smooth integration with other IT systems means there’s more room to work on innovations or get started with new partners. ‘We want to build something sustainable that we can still use several years from now. Our IT infrastructure therefore needs to be less complex for us to develop innovations or even start new collaborations. And everything is running much more smoothly with our BI software now, so we can prepare ourselves and be ready for the future,’ says Michel Kennis.
