YF Life, one of the top insurance companies in Hong Kong, has expanded its use of Pure Storage’s technology to accelerate the deployment of a powerful new core administration system. The new system will empower YF Life’s 2,700 consultants to access data and mission-critical applications rapidly and securely, supporting the company’s rapid growth.
YF Life, previously named MassMutual Asia, officially launched its new brand identity in April 2019 after the completed merger with publicly listed Yunfeng Financial Group Limited, a fintech platform. Leveraging the robust financial background and FinTech capabilities of the new majority investor, YF Life envisions to become a FinTech insurance company, offering an elevated experience in insurance and value-added services.
YF Life is dedicated to using a technology-enhanced approach, offering competitive global insights and insurance intelligence to individuals and families in Hong Kong, the Greater Bay Area, and beyond. A powerful storage system with high performance and reliability was the platform it needed to deliver new innovative services.
“We spent a lot of effort and resources on performance design and continuous tuning in our legacy storage solutions, but still experienced unnecessary system downtime during maintenance or upgrades,” said Daryl Cheng, Senior Vice President, Management Information Systems at YF Life.
In the view of strategic advantage for YF Life, one of the highest priorities is having an infrastructure in place that is capable of resolving the conflict between rising costs and the need to invest in innovation to reduce the licensing costs and capacity requirements, as well as paving the way for access to the latest technology together with totally non-disruptive upgrades with complete preservation of prior investment. YF Life needed a new solution as it prepared to launch its new core administration system. Together with its technology partner, HKBN Enterprise Solutions, YF Life decided to move its entire storage infrastructure to Pure Storage.
“YF Life was about to embark on a critical new technology deployment and they needed a fresh approach to their storage infrastructure as it underpinned their data strategy. Having seen first-hand how Pure’s technology work so seamlessly and powerfully with other customers, we had no hesitation to recommend them to YF Life. I don’t have to tell you how important data is to an enterprise let alone one in the financial industry,” said Andy Lau, Chief Commercial Officer, Cloud Service, and Co-owner at HKBN Enterprise Solutions.
In 2016, in order to reduce the undesired operational time for system tuning, automatization and technology refresh, YF Life first deployed a Pure Storage FlashArray//M to replace the legacy hybrid storage system, supporting tier 2 internal systems. This year, YF Life expanded its use of Pure with the more powerful Pure FlashArray//X together with Purity ActiveCluster replication solution. YF Life has since shifted its core tier 1 applications to the new platform, in particular, its new core administration system.
“We started using Pure for our tier 2 needs in 2016 and saw for ourselves that they were truly able to deliver features our legacy storage couldn’t deliver, such as 99.9999% availability, reliable performance, non-disruptive upgrades and zero administration. We therefore decided to move all our workloads to Pure,” said YF Life’s Cheng.
Delivering High Performance, Low TCO And Predictive Support
The Financial services industry (FSI) faces unique challenges when it comes to data protection. Between massive data growth, budget limitations and the demands of compliance, they need reliable and cost-effective solutions that make it easy to store, protect and access data, as well as analyze it immediately for financial gain or to unleash potential opportunities in the future.
“With Pure FlashArray, we now have a reliable and fast storage system which is easy to manage. It’s almost effortless and provides future seamless technology refresh. We can now focus on innovation, helping our customers make the best possible financial planning for their future,” YF Life’s Cheng added.
