Northwestern Mutual

This article is based on an interview with Vinny Carpenter,vice president of Engineering at Northwestern Mutual.

Strategy and Approach to Cloud Adoption and Utilization

Northwestern Mutual is a166-year-oldFortune 100 financial services company headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Specifically, Northwestern Mutual takes a holistic approach to financial planning and provides insurance, investments, and annuities, whichbegins with a financial advisor as the entry point. To date, the company has more than 9,000financial advisors nationwide.

Further, Northwestern Mutual’s missionis to free Americans from financial anxiety – so people can live the life they want, today and tomorrow. As such,our enterprise technology strategy is designed to align with and focus on delivering our company's overall business strategy to create differentiated client experiences and better client outcomes.

Key Benefits and Challenges Experienced in the Cloud Journey

When leveraged across Northwestern Mutual’s technology ecosystem, cloud computing capabilities have provided significant business value. The cloud enables and accelerates our business with access to innovation, scale, speed, security, and an always-on connected experience not easily achievable within our data centers. Key benefits include:

• Accelerates our pace of delivery. ​

• Allows us to leverage emerging tech (e.g., Generative AI, machine learning, containers, data, etc.)​

• Improves our systems’ resiliency and flexibility.

• Improves our security posture with built-in security rather than bolted-on.

• Human capital benefits to both recruit and retain top talent.

• Financial transparency to understand the cost of each of our applications.

Some of the key opportunities we’re addressing include:

• Evolving from a 'startup' scale cloud platform to an 'enterprise-scale cloud platform.

• Standardization and simplification to remove optionality while providing a great developer experience.

• Leveraging automation for everything to ensure consistency, security, and an automated way to deploy or roll back applications, data, or infrastructure.

• Pivoting our platform capabilities from the adoption of ‘innovators’to engaging the ‘late majority’ as our primary consumers.

• Maturing our DevSecOps capabilities to leverage code and automation to enforce security policies and practices.

• Providing unified and standard patterns for ​building, deploying, and ​operating applications and ​infrastructure.

  ​Embrace the mantra of continuous learning and improvement as technology in the cloud space evolves quickly. 

Integration of Legacy Systems with Cloud-Based Solutions

Integrating legacy systems with cloud-based solutions can be a complex task, but there are several best practices and lessons learned that can help ensure a successful integration. Here are some key considerations, insights, and lessons from our journey:

• Take an Incremental Approach - Don't migrate everything to the cloud simultaneously. Prioritize which systems and data should move based on business needs, roadmap, technical feasibility, and resource availability.

• Leverage APIs - Many legacy systems can expose functionality via APIs to which cloud apps can connect. This allows access to data and features of legacy systems without fully migrating them.

• Re-architect Where Possible - For legacy systems that are being actively maintained and enhanced, consider re-architecting them using cloud-native principles like microservices. This makes integration with cloud apps easier in the long term.

• Validate Integrations Thoroughly – A comprehensive test plan and automated test suites will be critical, as you will want to test integrations extensively before deploying to production. A rollback plan in case of issues will also be crucial.

• Start Small and Deliver Value - Focus initial integrations on high-value data and capabilities that provide tangible business benefits. Let that success build momentum and justification for more significant integration initiatives.

• Partnership and Collaboration - Collaboration between theengineering, product, data, and business teams is crucial to determine what to integrate, define requirements, validate effectively, and provide ongoing support.

The primary key is taking it step-by-step, utilizing appropriate tools and expertise, and having patience, as integrating with legacy platforms and architectures can be complex.

Cost Optimization and Resource Management in the Cloud

Cost optimization and resource management in the cloud are critical for ensuring you spendthe resources you need while maintaining your applications' performance and reliability. Here are some of our approaches to optimize our spend in the cloud

• Connectivity with our FinOps Team:
  
  
  • Our dedicated FinOpsteam focuses on monitoring our cloud spend and provides reports, dashboards, and alerts to our engineering teams to ensure appropriate usage of our cloud resources.
  
  
  • We have a regular cadence to review and adjust the size of our computing and storage capacity based on actual usage.
  
  
  • We use reporting and cost-optimization tools our cloud providers offer to recommend instance sizes based on historical data.
  
  
  • We leverage all available discounts that are available as part of your cloud contract.
  
  
  
  


• Clean Up Unused Resources:
  
  
  
  • We regularly review and terminate unused resources like instances, volumes, and snapshots. We automate the cleanup process using scripts or third-party tools where appropriate.
  
  
  • We use object lifecycle policies to transition older data to cheaper storage classes or archive/delete them.
  
  
  
  


• Implement Cost Allocation Tags:
  
  
  
  • We use tags to categorize and track ourcloud resources by project, department, or environment. This helps in attributing costs and optimizing accordingly.
  
  
  • This also allows us to show back the cost of applications and components to our business partners.
  
  
  
  


• Architect for Cost:
  
  
  
  • When designing cloud solutions, we consider the cost implications of our architectural decisions. For example, serverless architectures can be cost-effective for sporadic workloads but might be more expensive for consistent, high-throughput workloads.
  
  
  
  

In summary, cost optimization is an ongoing process. It’s important to review and adjust your strategies as your workloads and the cloud provider's offerings change. Additionally, it’s important to build a more cost-conscious culture by educating your partners about the costs associated with the resources they're using.

Advice to Fellow Peers and Colleagues

Here are some things to consider as you lead your organization's journey to the cloud:

• Vendor Lock-In - Leveraging open-source and open standards is one of the key ways to achieve portability, should you ever need to move cloud providers.

• Legacy Apps - Re-architecting complex monolithic apps for the cloud can be challenging and require app modernization.Minimize the lift-n-shift approach and invest in refactoring as you migrateapps to take advantage of some cloud capabilities.

• Talent Gap - Reskilling staff to use cloud services or acquiring cloud expertise may take some time. Create a program to upskill your existing talent and add external expertise to the team as needed.

• Governance - Managing sprawl and costs across multi-cloud environments requires tight governance and oversight.Leverage industry best practices, vendor frameworks, and any other resource to ensure the right level of governance for your organization.

• Standardization and Simplification – Lean into standards and simplification of your capabilities. Removing optionality in your offerings will pay huge dividends as the usage of your cloud platform grows. This will also reduce the cognitive load from teams using your platforms.

• Continuous Improvement– Embrace the mantra of continuous learning and improvement as technology in the cloud space evolves quickly. Having some dedicated time to evaluate your operating model continually will pay dividends as you can make incremental changes to adopt the new patterns and best practices.