An international specialty insurer assesses 500+ servers in three weeks.

# Insurance Customer Story — 3 wks to assess 500+ servers

**Industry:** Insurance
**Cloud:** Multi-Cloud
**Outcome:** 3 wks to assess 500+ servers

## Summary
A cloud migration that could not be sequenced until the portfolio was understood. Automated discovery across a mixed Windows and Linux estate replaced the survey-and-interview path, closing the assessment in three weeks and taking 2,000+ person-hours off the critical path.

## The Challenge
An international specialty insurance firm operates in a heavily regulated market, which means an IT estate that has to hold up under examination. Supporting that operation was an application portfolio spread across more than 500 servers — mixed Windows and Linux, built up over years of global growth.The firm had committed to a cloud migration, and the programme could not sequence itself until someone could say, per application, what it was, what it depended on, and what should happen to it. That assessment was the constraint.Conventionally it is done by survey and interview: chase down an owner for each application, ask what it talks to, and hope the owner is still there and still right. Two things made that untenable here. The first was arithmetic — 500+ servers is a quarter of elapsed time before any workload moves. The second was accuracy: applications were spread across multiple machines, so the blast radius of migrating any one of them was precisely what interviews establish worst.What the firm needed was a rapid assessment that produced actionable output — migration feasibility and strategy per application, not an inventory.

## The Solution
Discovery, dependency analysis, categorization, and reporting ran as one pass — so the topology pulled out of the estate is what drove the disposition call on each application, and the priority order was set by the same data rather than by whoever was loudest in the room.CHAI DART's automated discovery inspected and assessed each application across all 500+ servers, Windows and Linux alike — no owner survey, no interview cycle, and no dependence on whether the original engineer is still with the firm.Because applications spanned multiple machines, blast radius was the hardest question in the estate. DART's dependency and topology diagrams mapped those relationships accurately, so the impact of migrating any one application on its interconnected systems was visible before it was scheduled.Each application was then categorized against the 6R strategies — Rehost, Refactor, Revise, Rebuild, Replace, Retire — on compatibility, dependencies, and performance requirements, and prioritized on business criticality, complexity, and cloud cost-saving potential. Detailed practitioner reports carried the findings, the recommended strategy, and an estimated timeline per application, framed against 12-factor application principles.

## The Outcome
The assessment of all 500+ servers and their applications closed inside the three-week timeline — the whole in-scope estate, not a sample.It also identified over 2,000 person-hours of manual survey and interview work that automated discovery removed from the critical path, with findings reproducible because they are derived from data rather than recall.The firm received a rationalization report with clear recommendations aligned to 12-factor application principles, and is proceeding with the recommended strategies — rehosting and containerizing on CHAI DART.The dependency and topology maps outlive the assessment. Because the blast radius of each application is now recorded as data rather than held in institutional memory, the migration programme can re-sequence itself as priorities change, without re-running the discovery.


## Stack
- CHAI DART
- Windows Server
- Linux
- 6R Framework
- 12-Factor Principles
- Containers



## Contact
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