Founded in 1935, Menora Mivtachim Insurance is one of Israel’s oldest and largest insurance and financial companies. Menora leads the industry in general and vehicle insurance. It also administers Israel’s largest pension fund, the Menora Mivtachim Pension.
To strengthen its leadership position, and as a central pillar of its digital transformation journey, Menora knew it had to transition from its legacy monolithic platform to a microservices and API-based system.
One of the main goals was to empower its customers and over 10,000 agents with a significantly enhanced, agile and secure application that could be available on any device – regardless of location.
"Menora is always on the cutting edge of technology in our industry, and we know that we constantly need to accelerate our digital transformation process, especially following the COVID-19 pandemic,” says Yaniv Katz, Menora Infrastructure Department Director. “One of the biggest challenges we faced was the multiplicity of products and suppliers in our existing infrastructure. Some of the systems were old, maintenance costs were high, and we didn’t have the support for services we needed.”
After considering a multitude of vendors, a decision was made to work with F5, due to its deep understanding of the entire application data pathway and the impressive support services offered at every juncture. Speed, security, and a freedom to innovate new services were paramount to Menora, and F5 was the right fit for the challenge .
Menora’s new solution was built around the F5 BIG-IP platform and augmented with F5 BIG-IP Application Security Manager.
As the project scope evolved, Menora also added F5’s Access Policy Manager (APM) to the mix, to secure, simplify and centralize access to all apps, APIs, and data. The solution supports users and their apps, wherever they access the software.
Crucially, the F5 platform has enabled Menora to fully embrace the world of microservices, APIs and distributed applications. Automation and management tools were gradually implemented throughout the project, allowing it to simplify and optimize the digital experience for both customers and agents.
With its newly accomplished API agility, Menora can now rapidly integrate F5 services into its new applications, cutting costs by a significant margin and accelerating time-to-market for products. The shift has already generated a chorus of positive feedback from customers and has freed up Menora’s business units to increase their focus on business innovation and service delivery.
“Moving to F5 has saved us a lot of money on operational and maintenance costs. Everything is simpler for our developers and DevOps teams. Strategically, we can now bring our applications to our customers, agents, and employees in an unprecedently simple, secure, flexible, and easy manner,” says Katz.
In addition to delighting customers and agents with new levels of digital ease, Menora’s work with F5 has already earned widespread attention for setting an industry best practice benchmark. Last year, the project triumphed in the cloud innovation and digital transformation category at Israel’s most prestigious IT awards.