Our data platform cut costs by up to 40%, accelerated analytics delivery by 20%, and unified enterprise data by modernizing its legacy environment using Microsoft Fabric.
Client
A Customer-First Insurance Company
Our client is a leading insurance provider in the UK, offering a wide range of products including car, home, travel, and life insurance. With a strong customer-centric philosophy, the organization balances deep industry heritage with a continuous focus on innovation.
Challenges
Legacy Systems Limiting Data-Led Growth
As data became central to pricing, risk, customer experience, and compliance, the insurer’s legacy data foundation began to show its limits. Built over 30 years, the environment was fragmented, costly to run, and not designed for modern analytics or self-service insights.
Outdated legacy data landscape, heavy manual processing, and Excel-based workflows slowed reporting, increased errors, and made it difficult for teams to trust or act on insights. To remain competitive, the firm needed a unified, scalable data platform that could reduce costs, improve agility, and support data-driven decision-making.
Clear Expectations, Tight Constraints
Our client needed a modern, scalable data platform that could:
- Reduce costs & migration complexity without disrupting existing operations
- Integrate smoothly with existing SQL systems
- Improve data accuracy and consistency
- Enable self-service analytics
- Support future growth
This had to be achieved while migrating large volumes of historical data and meeting governance and security requirements.
Solution
Hexaware-Led Microsoft Fabric Modernization
To move beyond incremental fixes, the insurer needed a modernization approach that aligned technology decisions with broader strategic goals.
The Data Modernization Vision with Microsoft Fabric
The goal was to build a modern foundation that could scale with the business and support long-term decision-making.
We partnered with our client to shape this vision into a practical data platform modernization program to build a unified Microsoft Fabric data platform, combining data platform consulting, cloud architecture design, and hands-on engineering.
Phase 1: Data Platform Assessment and Strategy Alignment
Hexaware began with a comprehensive data platform assessment and advisory engagement, evaluating Microsoft Fabric against our client’s existing landscape, data strategy, and future growth plans.
This phase focused on:
- Understanding legacy constraints and cost drivers
- Identifying opportunities to consolidate enterprise data
- Reducing reliance on manual Excel-based reporting
- Aligning the target platform with existing SQL-based systems
The assessment outcomes were reviewed with our client’s internal technology lab, leading to formal approval of Microsoft Fabric as the strategic data platform.
Phase 2: Designing & Implementation of Medallion Architecture
With the platform selected, we defined a clear target data architecture built on Microsoft Fabric and OneLake.
A Medallion Architecture was designed to bring structure and governance to data movement:
- Bronze for raw ingestion
- Silver for standardized and transformed data
- Gold for curated, business-ready datasets
This design ensured consistent data processing, improved data quality, and a clear separation between raw data and analytics-ready views.
Phase 3: Building Metadata-Driven Framework
To improve scalability and reduce manual effort, we implemented a metadata-driven data engineering framework within Microsoft Fabric.
Key capabilities included:
- Automated ingestion and orchestration using Fabric Data Factory
- Reusable notebooks to apply business logic and aggregations
- Standardized ETL processes across data sources (structured and semi-structured) from internal systems and external platforms, streamlining end-to-end data processing.
As part of this phase, approximately 3TB of historical data was migrated with minimal disruption, ensuring continuity for existing reports and operations.
Phase 4: Modernizing Reporting and Self-Service Analytics
With trusted data layers in place, Hexaware helped our client modernize its analytics and reporting capabilities using Power BI.
This included:
- Unified reporting across domains
- Semantic models built on direct lake storage mode
- Enablement of self-service analytics for business users
The result was faster access to insights and reduced dependency on technical teams for routine reporting needs.
Phase 5: Establishing a Secure, Scalable Cloud Foundation
Finally, we supported our client in establishing a secure, enterprise-grade cloud environment on Azure, with Microsoft Fabric at its core.
The platform was designed for:
- High availability and dynamic scaling
- Secure data access and governance
- Future expansion across additional business units and use cases
This foundation ensures that the data platform can evolve alongside the organization’s growing analytical and regulatory demands.
Benefits
Measurable Outcomes Across Cost, Speed, Insight
The modernized platform delivers immediate and measurable results across cost, speed, and analytics.
35–40% Cost Reduction in Data Platform Spend
By replacing legacy infrastructure and optimizing resource usage through Microsoft Fabric’s dynamic scaling, the client achieved significant cost savings while improving performance.
20% Faster Time-to-Market for Analytics
Automated pipelines and standardized data layers reduced manual effort and accelerated the delivery of reports and insights to business teams.
Effortless Scaling for New Data Sources
The metadata-driven framework and Medallion Architecture enabled seamless onboarding of new data sources with minimal re-engineering, supporting future business expansion.
Self Service Analytics for Decision-Making
Business teams gained access to trusted, consistent data through Power BI, enabling faster and more confident decision-making across functions.
Stronger Data Trust, Security, and Compliance
Microsoft Fabric’s built-in security and governance capabilities improved data accuracy, consistency, and regulatory compliance—critical in the insurance domain.
Summary
A Future-Ready Data Platform in Action
The insurer now operates on a modern, Microsoft Fabric–based data platform that replaces decades of siloed systems with a single, scalable foundation.
Today, the insurer operates on a modern, Microsoft Fabric-powered data platform that replaces decades of fragmented legacy systems with a unified, scalable architecture.
The successful validation of the architecture has enabled its extension across additional production streams and business units. The platform is now positioned to support evolving analytics needs, new data sources, and future innovation.
We continue to work closely with the client on their Microsoft Fabric journey, helping expand the platform, strengthen governance, and unlock new business use cases.
Explore how Hexaware helps insurers modernize data platforms with Microsoft Fabric.
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