How Allianz Ayudhya accelerated cloud transformation and cut operating costs with SoftwareOne

Mitigating IT toxicity and the phased migration to AWS

Allianz Group, the world’s largest insurance company, has made it a strategic priority to accelerate cloud adoption across its global operations. For Allianz Ayudhya – the Allianz division in Thailand – this meant overhauling its legacy environment.

With more than 500 servers supporting on-premises workflows, the primary obstacle for Allianz Ayudhya was an accumulation of “toxic” infrastructure: on-premises servers that were rapidly approaching end-of-life and end-of-support status. These aging environments posed immediate security vulnerabilities, constrained operational agility, and exposed Allianz Ayudhya to costly hardware procurement delays.

Kristphop Chotjirathanont, Head of Country Enterprise Architecture at Allianz Ayudhya, faced a critical crossroads: reinvest heavily in depreciating on-premises hardware or execute a massive, structural leap to the cloud.

A migration aligned with the Allianz group objective of driving cloud transformation, but such a project still had to stack up from a financial point of view. “Without a sound business case for the AWS migration to present to management, we would not be able to proceed,” says Chotjirathanont.

To build a viable business case and execute this high-stakes migration, Allianz Ayudhya required a collaborator with a proven track record. “I knew SoftwareOne because they had already worked on cloud transformation projects with other Allianz entities in the APAC region,” Chotjirathanont explains. “I was confident that SoftwareOne had both the required technical expertise and the broader experience to explain why the migration was the correct business decision.”

SoftwareOne’s plans, timelines, and projected ROI convinced Allianz Ayudhya’s management, and the AWS cloud migration began in 2023.

To ensure minimal disruption to daily insurance operations, SoftwareOne and Allianz Ayudhya migrated 500 servers to AWS around specific business divisions using a structured lift-and-shift approach, while rearchitecting the infrastructure where feasible.

The migration focused initially on the Property & Casualty (P&C) infrastructure, moving critical servers handling motor and non-motor (property, fire, personal accident, etc.) insurance to AWS. “The disruption was minimal,” says Chotjirathanont. “For this first phase in 2023, the P&C business experienced disruption for three days which is acceptable, considering the scale of the migration.”

The P&C migration drove Allianz Ayudhya’s cloud adoption rate from 30% to 45%.

The migration of the Life & Health (L&H) division followed in 2025. Building upon the lessons learned from the P&C project, SoftwareOne optimized the deployment process for the L&H business server environment, limiting the disruption to just one day. “Overall, it was a smooth experience,” affirms Chotjirathanont, “and the result of a carefully planned and executed journey.”

Following this second phase, Allianz Ayudhya’s cloud adoption soared to 76%, surpassing the Allianz Group cloud transformation target of 75% cloudification by 2025.

Data center and cloud environment consolidation

In parallel with the server migrations, SoftwareOne addressed Allianz Ayudhya’s extensive physical hardware footprint. The insurer originally maintained four data centers: two primary facilities and two dedicated disaster recovery (DR) sites.

Through systematic consolidation, SoftwareOne helped Allianz Ayudhya shrink its physical data center footprint down by half, resulting in an optimized setup with a single primary site and a single DR site.

The two-phase migration to AWS and the data center consolidation delivered clear, quantifiable returns on investment.

In 2024, Allianz Ayudhya’s operational run costs for servers and data centers stood at approximately $8m. By 2026, following the migrations and data center consolidation, those costs dropped to $6m, translating to a 24% reduction in baseline operational expenditure.

“This is good news for the business,” says Chotjirathanont, “but for me, the biggest benefit has been moving away from the end-of-life infrastructure to a more standardized, better-managed environment, giving us better security.

“It is worth adding that SoftwareOne delivered all the stages of this transformation on time and within budget.”

To eliminate architectural fragmentation, Allianz Ayudhya engaged SoftwareOne to execute an application migration project moving workloads from Microsoft Azure to AWS. Over 300 containerized applications, previously hosted on an Azure environment managed by an Allianz subsidiary partner, were refactored and shifted into the core AWS cloud environment alongside the newly migrated application servers.

This six-month unification project delivered substantial performance and logistical advantages.

“The direct cost savings are not that significant because we moved from one cloud to another. However, we are saving a lot on performance and bandwidth cost because everything now resides in the same cloud, which is the AWS cloud.”

By housing its workloads within a single cloud provider, Allianz Ayudhya has established unified security protocols, reduced cross-cloud data transfer costs, and simplified its engineering workflows.