WTW Spins Up More Consistent Cloud Resources Faster with Puppet
The Insurance Consulting and Technology business at WTW (Willis Towers Watson) delivers a powerful combination of leading-edge advisory services and innovative technology solutions to insurers globally. Puppet helps to deploy VMs quickly and consistently, allowing their development teams to focus on product development and follow strong Agile practices.
Benefits of Using Puppet:
Consistent VM provisioning
eliminates manual error and is a “massive time-saver”.
Reusable code unites teams
under a single IaC ideology for managing cloud infrastructure.
Efficiency gains = less effort
to manage a greater number of servers without staffing up or overburdening teams.
Challenge: Deploying + Growing Cloud Infrastructure Securely with Less Effort
“WTW’s Insurance Consulting and Technology business serves more than 75% of the world’s leading insurers, with more than 1,000 companies globally using our software,” says Darren Gipson, Lead DevOps Engineer in WTW’s Insurance Consulting and Technology team. “And as our technology solutions increasingly move from being housed on-premises by clients to cloud and software as a service (SaaS), we needed the elasticity — and cost effectiveness — offered by Puppet.”
He says the ability to spin up new virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud quickly for any purpose — without incurring long-term charges from their existing on-premise approach — “empowered us to control what we're spending our money on.”
Watch the video below to hear more from Darren about the benefits WTW has seen and what surprised him the most about using Puppet to build and manage WTW’s cloud infrastructure.
“Puppet has allowed us to add vital common tooling to our VMs without the need to manage a complex imaging process, providing our application teams with the ability to add the layers of configuration they need without having to worry about base layer requirements.”
To support more flexible cloud provisioning and reliable cloud infrastructure management, WTW’s Insurance Consulting and Technology business chose Puppet’s leading automation, VM configuration management, and infrastructure as code (IaC) tools.
Results: Self-Service, Reliable Configurations + More Time for Strategy
“For us, it just works.”
Darren Gipson, Lead DevOps Engineer, Insurance Consulting and Technology, WTW
“Our experience has been that once you’ve built your VMs, Puppet will come along, it will onboard everything, and it’s consistent,” Darren says. “For us, that has been a massive win. It means that we no longer need to have someone remember the different steps required to set up an environment.”
Watch the Full Webinar
In this cloud-focused case study webinar, Darren Gipson from WTW’s Insurance Consulting and Technology business shares how they addressed some of their cloud computing challenges with Puppet, as well as how his team integrated self-service provisioning with a governance layer to ensure security in their platform.