Case Study: Premera Blue Cross reduces costs and scales operations with Microsoft Azure

Not-for-profit health plan company migrates to the cloud to deliver premium customer service, reduce costs

Premera Blue Cross, a Pacific Northwest health plan serving more than 2.75 million members, was spending significant time and money managing its Kubernetes environment on Microsoft Azure. Its previous setup was unstable, hard to scale, and required a team of more than 10 people, slowing work on its DataHub initiative and increasing operational costs.

Using Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Premera moved to a more secure, stable, cloud-native platform that could auto-scale and reduce maintenance. Microsoft Azure helped enable a zero-disruption migration, and the results were substantial: Premera cut 20 clusters to 4, saved $700,000 on day one, reduced total cost of ownership by up to 60 percent, and freed up a 10-person team to focus on higher-value work.

Premera Blue Cross

Henry Larrymore

Senior Cloud Engineer, Digital Customer Experience (DCX)