Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Japan CO-OP Insurance Consumers' Co-operative Federation (JCIF) has adopted Red Hat OpenShift as the foundational platform for JCIF’s “Co-op My Page,” an online portal for policyholder support and new policy applications.
JCIF delivers insurance solutions in the spirit of mutual aid, offering a broad range of insurance types and policies according to the needs of its members. Specifically, JCIF emphasizes policies intended to provide enhanced financial and health security for spouses and children, with the organization serving as Japan’s largest provider of child insurance policies.
Transforming insurance, digitally
As online solutions have become the point of contact for policyholder support and new policy applications, JCIF has developed a variety of services for its web-based systems to meet these demands. The centerpiece of this strategy is the “Co-op My Page.” My Page helps make it easier for policyholders to claim mutual aid benefits, make address changes and other administrative tasks via a centralized site with 24/7/365 availability. Additionally, My Page is also intended to help drive business processing efficiency for JCIF in an effort to better streamline how the organization handles policyholder requests.
With My Page covering a broad range of services and functionality, JCIF needed to be able to more quickly and flexibly respond to the changing and diversification of end user needs. This prompted the organization to adopt a multi-vendor approach, building applications separately for each service and commissioning a different vendor to develop each application.
The introduction of each vendor, however, required changes to service configurations and resources, straining the underlying legacy system. In addition, in order to respond to spikes in service demand, server resources had to be readied for whatever the projected maximum user requirements would be. These service spikes compounded challenges that JCIF already saw with its legacy systems, including siloed application stacks, end-of-lifecycle support and the inability to integrate with emerging Web-based technologies
Bridging digital gaps with containers and Kubernetes
With these realities front-and-center, JCIF decided to use more portable and flexible container technology, which could separate the runtime environment for each application and service. This helped to simplify JCIF’s multi-vendor development approach and enabled a faster, lower cost path to effective service delivery and resource usage. To power its container strategy, JCIF selected Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, for its streamlined, supported operations across the cloud-native lifecycle, from container preparation to tuning and log configuration.
JCIF began rebuilding its web system infrastructure in October 2017, with operations starting in January 2019 and My Page entering full production in June of that same year. The organization also began operating two additional OpenShift-based systems in May 2019.
The benefits of cloud-native
Previously, settings and configuration changes to JCIF’s web environment could only be made on a server-by-server basis; under the new system, changes for each application can be made at the container level, reducing the time it takes to manage underlying environments. This also increases developer and IT operations freedom across the organization. In addition, reducing delivery time has made it possible to more quickly develop new applications and services. JCIF can now also increase and decrease resources flexibly to handle demand spikes, eliminating the need to prepare resources in anticipation of maximum loads, leading to a reduction in IT costs.
ITOCHU Techno-Solutions (CTC) provided consulting, design and development for JCIF, while Red Hat provided technical product support for this project.
Supporting Quotes:
Hirokazu Mochizuki, president and representative director, Red Hat K.K.
“We are very happy that Red Hat OpenShift has been selected as a solution that can more precisely solve the issues related to Japan CO-OP Insurance Consumers' Co-operative Federation’s web systems infrastructure. Red Hat OpenShift helps organizations gain the full benefits of containerized applications running on enterprise Kubernetes, from portability across the hybrid cloud to improved developer efficiency, and we look forward to continuing our support of JCIF as it seeks to enhance the policyholder experience through cloud-native technologies.. ”
Ken Kawazoe, manager, Web Systems Development Department, Development Division, Japan CO-OP Insurance Consumers' Co-operative Federation（JCIF）
“Going forward, dedicated sites will have to be opened in as short a time as possible, with all the necessary functionalities and with greater convenience. Sudden, concentrated accesses are also anticipated. In our search for a product that will offer agility and flexibility, we introduced Red Hat OpenShift as our web systems infrastructure and it performed as expected. We are hoping to have continued support and cooperation from Red Hat and CTC for the stable operation of our current system and future migration work.”
Takanori Minatohara, Managing Executive Officer, ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation
“Japan CO-OP Insurance Consumers' Co-operative Federation's redesign of its web infrastructure system for the Co-op My Page enabled improved development efficiency for their systems and the achievement of faster, lower-cost delivery through the use of the Red Hat OpenShift. We took great pride in using our accumulated know-how and container technology in consulting, designing and developing this implementation. Going forward, we will look to further enhance the deployed container technology, extend stability of operations and resolve systems issues as they emerge for JCIF and their end users.”
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Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. Red Hat helps customers integrate new and existing IT applications, develop cloud-native applications, standardize on our industry-leading operating system, and automate, secure, and manage complex environments. Award-winning support, training, and consulting services make Red Hat a trusted adviser to the Fortune 500. As a strategic partner to cloud providers, system integrators, application vendors, customers, and open source communities, Red Hat can help organizations prepare for the digital future.
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