Discovery Holdings explores the opportunities of multi-cloud without the complexity

Developing new products and services that will “wow” customers is a full-time commitment—especially in a fast-paced digital world. Companies providing financial services are under constant pressure from the threat of agile fintechs and ever-changing customer expectations. To stay ahead, they need to offer value, self-service and apps that engage and inspire customers. Building best-in-class cloud services comes down to giving developers a greater choice of how and where they build new apps. While multi-cloud promises limitless opportunities, without proper management, costs and complexity can escalate quickly.

Discovery Holdings has invested in VMware technology to get a single view of its multi-cloud environment, standardizing management tools and accelerating the delivery of exciting new developments that have a real impact on customer wellbeing.

South African insurance provider, Discovery Holdings, doesn’t just protect people. It actively encourages customers to make healthier decisions to promote wellness. Its Vitality program rewards healthy behavior with points that customers collect over a year to unlock health, lifestyle and leisure benefits.

And that’s just one of its ground-breaking products. Discovery Holdings also offers financial services such as online and investment banking, medical aid, car and home insurance, and travel services to customers worldwide. Some of the company’s most innovative developments include a digital weight loss assistant, an app to book discounted flights and an online portal to access and manage medical plans.

In short, a lot is happening and it’s no different behind the scenes. The company was quick to kick off its cloud journey in 2012, recognizing the need to scale seamlessly, get new services to market quickly and give staff and customers a great digital experience.

Today, its cloud operations span four hyperscalers and it has on-premises data centers across 16 regions. To simplify managing this multi-cloud environment, Discovery Holdings rolled out VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth and VMware Aria Hub powered by VMware Aria Graph. In the future, it plans to extend this to get that all-important single view across the entire estate.

Centralizing cloud management on one platform

The platform services team at Discovery Holdings is responsible for providing seamless cloud services to internal customers, helping them choose the right cloud or SaaS solution for their workloads.

“Managing disparate environments is complicated. They all come with their own challenges. It’s difficult to get a clear view of costs when you’re dealing with operational expenditure from data centers and capital expenditure across four different clouds. There’s no common interface or language and each platform captures different metrics,” explains Johan Marais, senior platform services manager at Discovery Holdings. “VMware Aria Cost gives us a standard set of tools for greater visibility and control over costs, performance, configuration, deployment and monitoring right across our multi-cloud environment.”

The company also needed a solution that would grow alongside its ambitions, including having the flexibility to easily onboard new cloud providers in the future. “Implementing VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth was a game changer in our multi-cloud strategy,” says Marais.

“Between 2018 and 2019, our AWS cloud investment doubled while more effective management and waste reduction led to a 40 percent decrease in costs.”

“VMware has been instrumental in running our multi-cloud environment efficiently for more than 10 years. We recently rolled out VMware Aria Automation for Secure Clouds to speed up deployment across multiple clouds and give internal customers self-service access to cloud accounts and workloads,” says Marais. “VMware Aria Automation gives us real-time visibility of cloud security postures and we can self-remediate any issues, which reduces the risk of a fault causing an outage.”

Having a single view of all cloud activity makes it quick and easy to identify these issues on a global scale. Once identified, they’re ranked in order of risk so the team can focus on the most critical incidents first.

“With VMware Aria Cost, we’re no longer hunting for information across a multi-territory environment. For the first time, it’s all there at the click of a button,” Marais explains.

Discovery Holdings has also recently adopted VMware Aria Hub powered by VMware Aria Graph to gain comprehensive visibility into two of its public clouds with powerful insights into security and cost. In the future, the team will use it across all the company’s cloud environments. Staff are excited to use the advanced search which harnesses powerful GraphQL query language to find information quickly at the tap of a button and is predicted to save time and improve the user experience.

Cost-effective and efficient

Discovery Holdings has mastered managing a multi-cloud environment without complexity and opened up a world of opportunities when it comes to developing new products or services.

VMware also supports the company’s shift to DevOps and enables it to maximize internal resources and do more with a small team.

Discovery Holdings estimates that without the automation VMware provides, it would need to hire two additional full-time staff to manage reporting and security management.

“Keeping pace with rapid digital innovation isn’t easy. VMware empowers us to respond quickly and stay in control,” says Marais. “Our journey has been a great success so far, and that’s down to a great team of curious people eager to learn more about multi-cloud and giving them the right tools for the job.”

To learn about our portfolio of services for building, running, managing and securing applications across multiple clouds, visit VMware Cross-Cloud services.

About the Author
Giulia Alessio, Senior Manager, Global Customer Advocacy has sound experience in global marketing and is responsible for creating and amplifying customer stories around the world, giving a voice to our most valued customer perspectives.