Ethias
Belgian insurer goes from legacy storage to a content platform fit for modern organizations.
Ethias, a key player in the Belgian insurance market has achieved significant milestones using Hyland's solutions. In 2022, Ethias was honored with the Best Brand prize and reported a turnover of €3 billion, split evenly between life and non-life policies, with 75% realized in the B2B sector.
In collaboration with NRB, one of Belgium's top three ICT companies, Ethias embarked on a digital transformation journey. NRB, with a turnover of €500 million and 3,500 employees across five European countries, played a crucial role in implementing Hyland's solutions.
Xenit, an Alfresco partner based in Leuven, Belgium, joined the initiative as a specialist in scaling and operational excellence. Together, Ethias, NRB, and Xenit sought a replacement for a Documentum archive, leading to the implementation of Hyland’s Alfresco platform.
Their Alfresco solution, managed by Xenit, handles approximately 180 million documents for Ethias. The implementation aimed to address challenges related to security, scalability, and performance. The architecture included an Alfresco cluster with Active Directory integration, Caringo Swarm for content storage, and an Oracle database managed by NRB.
The system's growth was steady, with about 2 million documents generated monthly. The implementation featured an innovative folder structure to optimize performance, and extensive monitoring, including Solr analytics for search queries, ensured system health and efficiency.
Security was a top priority, with integration with CA SiteMinder, Active Directory, and Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC). Content encryption before storage in Caringo Swarm added an extra layer of protection.
The collaboration showcased a successful service integration and management (SIAM) model, emphasizing end-to-end responsibility between NRB, Xenit, and Ethias. Regular strategic, tactical, and operational meetings fostered a trustful and collaborative environment.
Future plans for the project include migrating from Swarm to an S3-based object storage solution and upgrading to Alfresco 7.4. Ethias and its partners plan to accommodate the growing document count by adding new Solr servers and evaluating the performance of the Alfresco cluster.