Neodigital Insurance AG

Greater data security and reliability, less administrative overhead

Exchange Hybrid: Paving the Way for the Cloud in Microsoft 365

Neodigital – Paper Is a Thing of the Past

Stephen Voss and Dirk Wittling knew that the future was digital when they founded Neodigital Versicherung AG in 2017. They have made it their mission to consistently digitize all processes and develop the startup into a “Leading Insurance Factory.” It’s a vision they’ve come a long way toward realizing over the years. Individual customers can handle all their communication with the insurer paperlessly, check the current status of their claims at any time with a click of the mouse on the web portal, make any necessary changes to their policies themselves, and download useful documents.

Thanks to its unique business model—the “insurance factory”—Neodigital has also been able to attract an increasing number of B2B customers. Other insurance companies integrate Neodigital’s services, which are provided on a modular basis, into their own product offerings, thereby becoming more digitally oriented.

Neodigital’s digital concept has thus proven successful in both the B2C and B2B sectors. Since its inception, the insurer has grown significantly and has established itself in the market with a wide range of products, such as personal liability, dog owner liability, home property, and bicycle insurance.

Initial Situation and Objectives

Neodigital Versicherung AG operated a Microsoft Exchange 2016 messaging infrastructure and a standalone Microsoft 365 tenant. Various sources of error could have triggered the loss of local services, which, in the worst-case scenario, would have led to a complete shutdown of the entire collaboration platform. A failure of the critical email service would very quickly have a negative impact on day-to-day operations.

Since locally hosted Exchange servers have increasingly become targets of cyberattacks in the past, service and operational costs have risen significantly. In particular, the need to keep the system constantly “up to date” and to rely on the expertise of external specialists to identify and close security vulnerabilities in the messaging system are key factors contributing to these increased operational costs.

As part of an infrastructure modernization project, Neodigital decided to move its messaging service to the cloud and migrate all mailboxes to Exchange Online.

Key factors in the decision were savings on storage costs and a reduction in administrative overhead, such as that associated with server updates. In addition, data security and disaster recovery capabilities are enhanced by secure and redundant messaging systems provided by Microsoft. Furthermore, thanks to the migration to Exchange Online, Neodigital is significantly better protected against cyberattacks, as the Microsoft email systems are very well operated and maintained by experienced staff. As a result, these systems have not been affected by major outages due to cyberattacks in recent years.

Neodigital Versicherung AG was already operating a Microsoft 365 tenant, which had previously been used in isolation from the on-premises infrastructure. This type of configuration requires double the administrative effort, as user management takes place in two systems (Active Directory and Azure Active Directory). In addition, the user experience is compromised because all employees must authenticate multiple times using different login credentials for the local and Microsoft 365 environments.

PROFI’s Service

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PROFI’s task was to migrate all email accounts to Microsoft Exchange Online in close collaboration with the Neodigital team. To achieve this goal, the first step was to prepare the local user directory and synchronize all employees’ accounts with Microsoft 365. This technical requirement had the added benefit of improving the user experience for employees who were already using Microsoft 365 services, such as Teams. Next, the hybrid configuration between Exchange 2016 and Exchange Online was set up.

This hybrid setup has the advantage of allowing mailboxes to be moved to Exchange Online with virtually no downtime. It also offers the option for a rollback if needed.

Thanks to their expertise and excellent collaboration, the teams from Neodigital and PROFI were able to quickly optimize configurations in the on-premises network infrastructure that were limiting cloud connectivity, thereby implementing the project fully within budget and on schedule.

The benefits: Increased security, reduced effort

As requested, the current hybrid solution provides significantly greater data reliability and disaster recovery capabilities than the previously locally hosted Exchange Server. Neodigital no longer has to handle server updates or the replacement of defective hardware components itself, as these are provided by Microsoft in the cloud and installed fully automatically. This benefits the customer in two ways: first, with noticeably reduced administrative effort, and second, by eliminating downtime caused by maintenance windows. With the hybrid solution now in place, the customer is well-equipped for the future thanks to flexibly scalable resources.

Conclusion

The on-premises Microsoft Exchange infrastructure of Neodigital Versicherung AG was to be migrated to the Microsoft Exchange Online cloud solution. The goals were to increase data security and reliability while reducing operational costs. Since on-premises servers are frequently targets of cyberattacks, maintenance is extremely demanding and administration is time-consuming in order to meet current security requirements.

The company commissioned its long-standing business partner, PROFI, to carry out the project. Working closely with the Neodigital team, PROFI implemented a hybrid solution—the parallel operation of cloud and on-premises services. This made it possible to achieve the client’s goals, and the client can now expand the flexibility, availability, and security of its organizational resources by introducing additional Microsoft 365 services in the future.