“We’re also looking at what is our next policy platform and there’s been some discussions about that,” said Charles Pizzato (pictured above) Suncorp Group’s executive general manager of IT infrastructure.
Pizzato is overseeing the giant insurer’s massive digital transformation. He said it is “likely” that this new policy platform will be hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud.
“By having that Microsoft cloud environment and all the security controls and ecosystem built there, we’ll be able to better integrate with other Microsoft cloud applications,” he said.
In January, Suncorp announced a three-year agreement with Microsoft. The deal allows the insurer to increase use of the Microsoft Azure cloud and will facilitate the migration of 90% of its IT systems up to the cloud by the end of 2023.
Pizzato said his firm’s current policy platform is mainframe based technology, relatively mature and has been around for some years.
“Things do move on and there’s an opportunity to look at what’s next,” he said. “All these sorts of [new] platforms are built on top of either Microsoft [Microsoft Azure] or AWS [Amazon Web Services], or Google [Google Cloud Services].”
Part of the agreement with Microsoft, said Pizzato, has involved deploying Microsoft Surface Laptops. Pizzato said Suncorp has now distributed about 13,500 across the firm’s Brisbane and Sydney offices. Almost 2,000 more were recently issued for the Melbourne office.
“It’s a pretty big step for us,” he said. Pizzato said that for many years Suncorp staff used virtual desktops in their data centres.
“There have been a lot of benefits from that,” he said. “It gave us big advantages in the early days, including in terms of security - all your data was in the data centre, which was hugely comforting but it was more a traditional sort of architecture around perimeter controls with endpoint security on the actual virtual machines, as well.”
The COVID-19 pandemic, he said, changed all that.
“COVID certainly changed our thinking around that and accelerated the importance of having an optimal end user experience, wherever you’re operating from, be that in the office, from a desk at home, on the beach, in another state, or overseas,” said Pizzato.
He said their traditional IT architecture did facilitate the process of quickly having staff work from home but it wasn’t ideal. Pizzato said the system “wasn’t so good” for collaboration technology like Teams and other interactive software.
The new surface laptops, he suggested, have facilitated an “optimal solution” for his firm’s work needs. Pizatto also said the laptops have far better security controls that are no longer focused around “just putting a bubble around the data centre and having an encrypted pipe into the data centre.”
The new laptops are incorporated into a zero-trust approach to security, he said, that involves “continuously authenticating someone as they using our technology.”
In terms of security, he suggested that in recent months, Suncorp has become more focused on a “defence in depth strategy.” This approach provides protections at all layers of the environment, rather than primarily around the perimeter.
Pizzato gave the analogy of an egg and its hard shell. Many organisations, he said, typically have security like an egg, so once you get through the shell, everything is “pretty squishy” and open to attack.
This includes attacks where a criminal will literally walk into an organisation’s office and plug a laptop into a network.
“This is actually how breaches often happen,” said Pizzato. “So it’s not just about securing the shell, every layer within the organization’s security framework needs to be tight and that makes it much more complex to be able to penetrate an organization’s security controls,” he said.
Pizzato said his firm’s “control framework” now has a “much more hardened environment right through the stack.” For example, there are now more specific controls over what applications and people can access across the network.
He said the recent cloud partnership deal with Microsoft actually followed a change in his firm’s position concerning the division of its data between the cloud and data centres. Last year, he said, Suncorp planned to ultimately retain some data in data centres.
“We actually changed our position to say we’re going to exit data centres and cloud will be our default, there won’t be an on-premise environment,” he explained.
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