Heidelberger Leben Group chooses the CANCOM BusinessCloud for IT reorientation

Munich/Cologne, 7 July 2015 - The Heidelberger Leben Group has modernised important parts of its IT infrastructure environment in less than seven months and will in future obtain its application environment from the BusinessCloud of the CANCOM Group. The IT group is also responsible for the corporate network and the company's internal network, and, with its User Help Desk, offers round-the-clock IT support for the insurance group. This means that today roughly 350 users employ all applications via a virtual desktop environment which CANCOM operates in its high-security data centres in Germany. In the future the employees of Skandia Germany and Skandia Austria, which have belonged to the Heidelberger Leben Group since October 2014, will also be able to access the new platform.

"As an insurance and consolidation platform, we are particularly reliant on a highly available and failsafe IT environment," says Markus Deimel, Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Member of the Board at the Heidelberger Leben Group. "With the CANCOM subsidiary Pironet NDH, we have found a strategic partner for our IT reorientation who provides us with access to state-of-the-art technology. We obtain precisely agreed quality commitments for our cloud environment, from user operation in the data centre to the network connection, right through to the individual workstations."

Business model and IT evolution at the Heidelberger Leben Group
The main reason for the IT modernisation of the Heidelberger Leben Group is a radical change of its business model: from sales companies focusing on products and turnover for mainly index-linked insurance offerings to a consolidation platform for - as a rule inactive - life insurance companies and inventories. The fully refurbished IT platform provides the fundament to permit maintenance and support of the managed inventories to be implemented not just quickly, effectively, and on a customised basis, but also at minimised cost.

"For us to succeed with our new business model, we require a best-in-class IT platform. By turning to the cloud we have thus largely standardised our IT environment, which used to be extremely heterogeneous, and drastically modernised it. As a result, we achieve the integration capability and the necessary transformation speed which are essential for our dynamic business model. At the same time we have become more flexible in terms of resource allocation and are reducing our costs - for instance for support services - significantly," explains Wolfgang Appl, Head of IT Operations at Heidelberger Leben Group.

Complete workstation environment from the cloud
With immediate effect, thin clients are available to the employees of the insurance group which enable them to access their IT workstations by means of a Citrix environment. The standard applications include Microsoft Office 2013. Depending on the department and employee, this is complemented by specialised applications which can be added on the IT side at the press of a button. As the workstation environment is virtual and is provided from the cloud, the staff can also access their desktops on a mobile basis from outside the company - for example from a home office - by means of a token access code. Notebooks are available for various users, these are also being protected by means of hard disk encryption on the hardware side.

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