Beneva is the country's largest mutual insurance company with 3.5 million members. Created by the coming together of La Capitale and SSQ Insurance in 2020, Beneva employs over 5,500 dedicated employees: people looking out for people. Beneva offers comprehensive portfolio of Group Insurance, Property and Casualty Insurance as well as Individual Insurance and Financial Services. Guided by its caring approach founded on human values, Beneva emphasizes customer-centered service, community engagement, and sustainability, including a net-zero commitment by 2050. With $27.5 billion in assets, it is expanding nationwide and is among Canada’s most customer-centric insurers.
Client challenge
As part of a broader cloud transformation strategy, Beneva’s Individual Insurance and Financial Services (IIFS) division initiated a project to migrate 15 applications from Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The migration was essential to:
- Reduce operational risk
- Standardize and streamline IT tools
- Improve performance and cost efficiency
However, Beneva set an ambitious timeline to complete the migration in order to minimize costs associated with its previous provider. The project needed to be delivered without business disruption, while maintaining close alignment between Alithya, Beneva’s IT organization, and the various application owners.
Key challenges included:
- Guaranteeing zero impact on business operations
- Ensuring continuous synchronization with the owners of the assets to be migrated
- Managing tight timelines under complex multi-team coordination
The Alithya + AWS Solution
To meet these goals, Alithya deployed its proven Cloud Migration Factory methodology — a structured, repeatable framework designed to accelerate large-scale migrations through automation, governance, and AWS best practices.
This approach integrates security, compliance, and performance optimization from day one, ensuring each migration is executed with precision, documentation, and validation at every step.
Methodology overview
Alithya’s Cloud Migration Factory is built around three key phases:
- Preliminary Analysis: Assess current workloads, dependencies, and readiness, defining the optimal migration path per application.
- Planning & Strategy: Develop a detailed migration plan aligning business priorities, risk management, and target architecture on AWS.
- Migration Factory Execution: Perform structured, automated migrations using standardized tooling to ensure speed, quality, and consistency.
Project scope
- Define the global migration strategy
- Migrate the applications on AWS based on a “Rehost” (lift-and-shift) approach for speed and reliability
- Transition Google Kubernetes Service (GKS) clusters to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
- Automate the deployment and environment configuration
- Validate functional and non-functional equivalence of migrated assets (monitoring, alert system, performance, etc.)
- Perform stress testing and standardized quality assurance all migrated assets in AWS for governance and traceability
- Decommission legacy GCP components post-cutover
Results and business impact
By leveraging its Cloud Migration Factory methodology, Alithya enabled Beneva to achieve a seamless migration that was on time, on budget, and risk-free.
Key outcomes:
- All success criteria were met
- Standardized tooling and best practices applied across all workloads
- No disruption to business operation
- 10% reduction in deployment time
- 25% reduction in hyperscaler costs
- Full compliance with Beneva’s internal governance and security standards
- Project delivered on time
The initiative not only achieved immediate savings and operational stability but also established a repeatable model for Beneva’s future cloud migrations.
By consolidating on AWS, Beneva now benefits from a more secure, scalable, and efficient cloud foundation, accelerating its broader transformation and enabling faster innovation across its insurance and financial services lines.