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. It offers a full range of products including 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 nationally and is among Canada’s top insurers.
Client challenge: Group insurance and property and casualty insurance lines of business
Following the success of its first cloud migration wave, Beneva launched Phase 2 of its transformation program to continue moving away from Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
This phase focused on the Group Insurance and Property & Casualty (P&C) lines of business, involving the migration of 11 applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS) within just five months.
The initiative aimed to:
- Maintain zero impact on business operations
- Unify enterprise architecture for better consistency and integration
- Increase team agility through modern, automated deployments
- Establish stronger governance and cost visibility around cloud assets
Deliver production-ready environments on time and within budget. To succeed, Beneva required a partner capable of executing a complex, multi-application replatform migration with precision, speed, and enterprise-grade security.
The Alithya + AWS Solution
Alithya applied its proven cloud migration factory methodology to optimize and accelerate the migration of services to AWS. The methodology operates on a structured, repeatable approach, leveraging automation and best practices to streamline the migration process. It integrates security processes at all levels and ensures an optimal migration strategy.
Methodology overview
Alithya’s migration framework is built around three key phases:
- Preliminary Analysis: Assess current workloads, dependencies, and modernization opportunities.
- Planning & Strategy: Define detailed migration blueprints aligned with Beneva’s enterprise architecture, security standards, and cost objectives.
- Migration Factory Execution: Execute migrations using standardized automation pipelines, with embedded security and validation at every stage.
Project scope
This second phase emphasized modernization through a replatform approach, enhancing performance, maintainability, and cost efficiency.
- Migrate the applications on AWS based on a “Replatform” strategy
- Transition Google Kubernetes Service (GKS) clusters to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)Migrate databases from Oracle to RDS, Aurora and MongoDB
- Replace native GCP or third-party services with AWS equivalents
- Active MQ → Amazon SNS / SQS for asynchronous messaging
- Integration of AWS Lambda functions and Amazon S3 storage
- Implement cloud cost-optimization strategies for ongoing consumption governance
- Ensure alignment with Beneva’s enterprise architecture principles, including security, resilience, and quality standards
- Document all migrated assets and assess technical debt where cloud foundation prerequisites were not yet available
- Manage full decommissioning of migrated components
Results and business impact
The project was executed seamlessly, delivering measurable benefits across performance, governance, and operational efficiency.
- All success criteria were met
- Centralized cloud governance
- No disruption to business operation
- 99.95% system uptime post-migration
- Zero data lost throughout cutover
- Project delivered on time and within scope
Through this engagement, Beneva successfully advanced from a lift-and-shift baseline to a modernized, optimized AWS architecture, strengthening its cloud foundation for future innovation. The initiative also improved team agility and cost transparency, enabling Beneva to manage and scale its digital ecosystem with greater control and insight.