How Aegon Life ensured business as usual in the times of lockdown

When asked about Aegon Life Insurance' s preparedness during the current pandemic, the company VP-IT Rupesh Mehta's reply was a mix of "Yes and No". He feels no one in the industry had ever imagined that the scenario would turn out to be so bad for such long lockdown. Fortunately, he said, "Our technology landscape allowed us to scale up quickly thus managing critical functionality for remote working at the start of lockdown itself. Further, we also extended the IT facility to make it more of BAU scenario"

Established 173 years ago, servicing 30 million customers while managing more than 29000 employees worldwide, Aegon Life Insurance is one of the leading insurance companies in India. With every business operation struck amid the lockdown, the IT operations teams of the insurance company fought with Covid 19 and ensured that business suffered no impact.

While the insurance firm managed most of the activity without any major challenges, according to Mehta, there were challenges at the start of lockdown for any hardware movement as it was a standstill situation. However, the company has the advantage of a VDI solution which allows them to extend the seamless experience for end-users even on their personal assets with all security controls taken care of.

He owes the successful management in the challenging times to Technology, Process and his team. Since the company has invested heavily on upgrading the IT infrastructure and adopting advanced technical solutions, it helped during the pandemic.

VDI deployment

"We had an option of VDI ( virtual desktop Interface) deployed on MS Azure platform, this allowed us to scale up very quickly without depending on end computing infrastructure. In addition, we were quick to implement a suite of collaboration options such as MS Teams etc. across the organisation" he explained.

Talking about the process, he said, "We worked very hard on our communication strategy with all stakeholders and management, allowing real-time updates on all actions. This helped us to gain quick confidence that the technology team was in complete control."

The third and most important factor was the Team. Mehta feels that one of the most critical factors was to ensure the support team and partners were geared up to face this extraordinary situation which required the team to go beyond their defined boundaries. He added that from his experience he has seen even the best technology solution can fail if it’s not supported by a perfect team. “Leaders need to stand with teams in such testing times and bring out the best from them by recognising every team member and his effort such that one goes beyond any defined boundaries and delivers with a full heart,” he said.

"At the start of lockdown, it was a war-like situation and every soldier was crucial to perform so we had literally created battle groups for tackling different issues and it helped us to come out as a better team," he said.

While sharing his learnings from the pandemic, he said, "Investing in advanced technology always helps organizations so I recommend that such initiatives should continue. Another important point for all technology leaders is to consider that today it is Covid 19 and tomorrow it can be any other challenges, so we need to keep reinventing ourselves on all aspects."

Mehta feels that we should not make the mistake of feeling this as new normal. We all are in process of evolving and adapting to a new way of life and there can be many other aspects which will unfold going forward, things will still undergo changes and evolve, so organizations and leaders need to plan accordingly.

Source: The Economic Times