Health Insurer Future-Proofs Mainframe Workloads While Saving $50M

This client is one of the nation’s largest not-for-profit healthcare organizations. It serves 3.5 million federal and commercial members, and employs over 9,000 staff across Maryland, northern Virginia, and D.C.

Consistently recognized as one of the world’s most ethical companies, this organization aims to offer high-quality healthcare insurance that is affordable, accessible and equitable.

The organization wanted to simplify software and mainframe maintenance while ensuring the long-term reliability of its mission-critical systems as it prepared for the retirement of experienced mainframe staff.

To do this, the client decided to move commercial workloads out of the data center and into AWS public cloud. For federal workloads that needed to remain on the mainframe, it needed to find a managed service provider to take over hosting and management.

Following a competitive RFP process, Ensono was selected to do this due to its mainframe expertise, flexible pricing, software purchasing power, and strong culture of transparency, reliability and collaboration.

To coincide with its data center lease coming to an end, and to enable the client to complete its enterprise license agreement (ELA) with the incumbent provider, we followed a multi-phased approach to outsourcing the management of the client’s federal mainframe workloads. We started with Ensono’s Remote Infrastructure Management solution, followed by Remote Hosted Mainframe services, before finally switching to Ensono’s fully hosted Mainframe-as-a-Service (MFaaS) on the client’s data center exit date.

Meanwhile, the commercial business had expected its workloads to be completely off the mainframe and in the cloud by this point, but due to client-side delays, the migration was behind schedule. Ensono scaled its hosted data center offering to include these additional workloads, giving the client additional time to scale down its mainframe requirements.

To improve performance and security, Ensono conducted a mainframe hardware refresh for both sides of the business, upgrading the federal side from an IBM z4 to z16 and the commercial side from z13 to z15. We also used our purchasing power to provide more cost-effective storage and software solutions, further reducing costs.

Ensono’s MFaaS solution allows the client to scale up or down as needed, in the most cost-effective manner. Mainframe skill shortages are no longer a concern, as the client now has Ensono’s mainframe experts taking care of its infrastructure.

A modern data center and refreshed hardware ensure that the organization’s customers will continue to receive the level of service they have come to expect.

And, with Ensono taking care of its mainframe workloads and securing lower software costs, the client can focus on its migration of commercial workloads to AWS while enjoying a 40% reduction in mainframe-related costs. Over the five-year period of work, the client will save $50 million, which can be reinvested in delivering an excellent customer experience.