Case Study: Hiscox achieves a 97% reduction in release costs with Puppet and DevOps

Hiscox Reduces the Cost of Release by 97% with DevOps and Puppet

Hiscox, a UK-based publicly traded property and casualty insurer (2014 revenue £1.77bn), faced pressure to speed up product delivery in a fast-moving, competitive market. Siloed teams, slow manual processes and lengthy release cycles made it difficult to respond quickly to business needs.

Hiscox adopted DevOps, reorganized into product-focused teams, created a platform services team and automated delivery with Puppet Enterprise (plus CI, automated testing and VMware orchestration). The changes cut cost per release by 97% for a major application, reduced time per release by 89%, lowered staff required for releases by 75%, ramped deployments from a 10-week cycle to about 50 per week, and halved VM build times.

Hiscox

Jonathan Fletcher

Enterprise Architect, and the Lead for Technology