MANACC Final Paper

Brief Company Background

The Insular Life Assurance Company, Ltd. or is more commonly known by its trade name, Insular Life
is a mutual life insurance company in the Philippines. Established on November 25, 1910 in Manila,
it is the first Filipino life insurance company. The company offers individual and group life, health,
and retirement insurance plans. Insular Life was once a member of the Ayala Corporation until 1987,
when it became a mutual company owned by its policyholders. Its Executive Chairman of the Board
is Nina D. Aguas and its Chief Executive Officer is Mona Lisa B. Dela Cruz. As of 2017, it is the seventh
largest life insurer in the Philippines in terms of premium income

Presentation and Discussion of Case

Like most company Insular view and approach to its IT infrastructure has remained fairly traditional.
The company has stuck with the typical in-house data centre, which as might you already guessed;
houses the company servers, data storage and network equipment. With this setup, the traditional
problem encountered are the following

1. Accumulations of large quantity of obsolete Datacentre hardware and outdated software

license after hardware and software refresh which is scheduled every five years.
2. Power consumption is also rising as more hardware are being plugged into datacentre, to
support the demand of the business.
3. The ability of the IT department to provide rapid provisioning of servers is also an issue
because of the lead time required to complete the entire process requesting to deploying
the servers.

A solution was found in the form of cloud-based computing. This form of servers and services
provisioning relies on the creation of virtual servers in the cloud, which means less physical servers
on premise and less software license to keep track because the model is subscription based which
means so long as the subscription is active the license is active and also there is an online accounting
of all available and used license.

Analysis

Although as possible solution might have been found, the management has to be presented with
evidence that this was a good solution. The evidence has to be in a form that management would be
able to digest, this cannot be presented to them from a perspective of the IT department, it has to
be broken down into cost analysis. What we did first to identify which existing system we want to
put in the cloud, which in our case was the email systems, this would really test the solution we have
chosen. The total client for the entire email enterprise was around 866, so if anything would prove
the robustness of the chosen cloud solution this was it. The next item was to identify the cost that
was attached to maintaining the system. These costs are the following:

 Hardware Cost – these are the cost for the servers that needed to maintain an on-premise
email system, in our case they were, Email Server, SMTP Gateway Server, DR Email Server,
DR SMTP Gateway Server.
 Software License Cost – these are the software license require by the servers Operating
System Server License, Email Client Access License (866), Exchange Server License (Email
Server), Server Anti-Virus License
 Microsoft Office License – these was for the office suite that includes the email client.

For the breakdown for the cost for the cloud-based solution, they are the following:
MANACC Final Paper

 O365 Subscription Cost for 866 users

 SSL Certificate Cost – this is required for the migration

The total cost for the on-premise setup was around 29M and for the Cloud-Based Setup was around
25M for 5 years. Aside from the cost evaluation there were other add-on for the Cloud-Base solution
that was considered such as:

 Access to the latest MS Office version

 99.99% availability of user data (mail, files placed on cloud storage)
 Access to collaboration applications such as Skype and Microsoft Teams.
 50GB of user mailbox storage (located in the cloud)
 1TB of cloud storage per subscribed user (OneDrive)

The outcome of the comparison is fairly obvious as the cloud-based solution clearly is more practical
choice, not only in cost but also value add-on.

Proposed Recommendation

After the cost and value comparison was completed, the recommendation to embrace the cloud-
based solution was prepared and presented. The first phase for the move to cloud was to begin, and
the company will start for with email system. This phase of the project was started begin of 2016
and was completed end of 2016. Other cloud base project has been completed since then like the
Group Policy Portal this for the management of clients group policy (for corporate clients). Other
company applications are being migrated, and would also nearing completion.