This summer has seen a number of important milestones for CDL's Strata cloud-only strategy, with the retail platform securing the Amazon RDS Ready designation on the back of its successful integration with Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and four customers completing the migration to the AWS hosted platform.

The move marks an acceleration in CDL's journey to bring the benefits of cloud hosting to its wider customer base, having established strong credentials developing and supporting platforms on AWS, including the Hummingbird data and analytics solution.

It also builds on the company's experience in completing Strata deployments to the cloud for customers already committed to cloud strategies, such as Co-op Insurance, RAC Insurance, Cogent and Tesco Bank (see 60 Second interview).

DLG's Darwin brand, iGO4 Insurance, Freedom Brokers and Comfort Insurance are the first to transition to Strata on AWS, as part of a major migration programme underway to enable all customers to access cloud benefits. It follows the successful migration from Oracle to PostgreSQL and Payara last year to facilitate the migration of Strata customers to the cloud.

CEO of iGO4 Insurance, Matt Munro, said: "We have built out our business model utilising technology innovations, whether that be in our customer experience or our use of data. A cloud infrastructure is critical to our ambitious strategy. We have already successfully migrated environments for both our own direct brand iGO4, as well as Darwin (Direct Line Group’s challenger brand), which we sit behind. The migration for the remainder of our brands will be complete by the end of 2021. We look forward to leveraging the new possibilities this will open up in 2022 and beyond."

Amongst the advantages of the migration to AWS is the ability to access the highest levels of resilience and security, along with the full benefits of the advances in engineering delivered in the cloud version of Strata. These include containerisation, automated deployments and testing, and highly resilient architecture.

Cloud hosting contributes to achieving 'five nines' uptime, as AWS' significant global infrastructure means that deployments are across multiple availability zones, ensuring systems continuity even if one zone fails.

Using a cloud platform means products are deployed rapidly, giving greater agility and competitiveness in the marketplace, and enabling retailers to scale up their infrastructure and capacity on demand.

CDL's status as an Advanced AWS Technology partner also brings access to AWS Enterprise Support, which provides a concierge-like service helping ensure the success of CDL customers. With Enterprise Support, CDL receives dedicated 24x7 technical support from high-quality engineers, tools and technology to manage the health of CDL services.

CDL uses leading edge monitoring tools, such as Dynatrace, to monitor the CDL layer of services built on top of AWS. Dynatrace uses machine learning, auto-discovery and dependency mapping to automatically analyse the dynamically scaling estate it is monitoring, as well as learning patterns within the environment, to understand proactively when things may be going wrong and trigger alerts to CDL engineers.

Achieving the Amazon RDS Ready designation, part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS), Inc. Service Ready Program, differentiates CDL as an AWS Partner Network (APN) member that has demonstrated success building products integrated with Amazon RDS.

CDL uses Amazon RDS to ensure high availability and performance for its customers' business-critical policy administration processes, helping customers evaluate and use AWS technology productively, at scale and varying levels of complexity.

"Customers are looking for ISV [independent software vendor] solutions that run on Amazon RDS, to easily deploy highly available databases with strict availability and performance requirements," said Jeff Carter, Vice President, Relational Databases, AWS. "We are delighted to welcome CDL as an Amazon RDS Service Ready Partner. Their Strata product helps customers power profitable growth for insurance retailers and modern digital journeys for consumers."

"We are delighted that CDL Strata has achieved AWS Service Ready status, leveraging the agility, breadth of services, and pace of innovation that AWS provides," said CDL Director of Software and Technology, Andrew Wormleighton: "We are dedicated to helping customers drive business success through technology, and the resilience and scalability of AWS services is key to ensuring that Strata provides a powerful core system across personal and commercial lines."