All case studies / Tokio Marine HCC International
Tokio Marine HCC International uses Octopus to empower teams with self-serve deployments
About Tokio Marine HCC International
Tokio Marine HCC International (TMHCCI), is a member of the Tokio Marine HCC (TMHCC) group of companies, one of the world’s leading insurance companies. As insurance specialists with deep technical and analytical business expertise, their portfolio helps customers thrive. They have a global reach, underwriting over 100 classes of specialty insurance in over 180 countries.
Challenges
Tokio Marine HCC International needed to drive autonomy in business and IT delivery teams
TMHCCI has many development teams supporting business needs, each with their own deployment challenges. The central IT DevOps team is involved in every deployment to non-production environments to ensure they run smoothly and effectively. TMHCCI also operates in a highly regulated environment, so had to ensure deployments were compliant.
TMHCCI wanted a tool to help facilitate its growth by streamlining deployments. They wanted to automate processes to empower people outside the DevOps team to deploy in a safe, reliable, and repeatable way.
Providing a self-service ability to our development teams is vital for our evolution and goal of streamlining the delivery of business change. It empowers our teams to develop and test more efficiently which generates more value for our business lines. Additionally, the automation of manual processes is aligned with our wider objectives regarding making our teams more effective by removing manual overheads, as well as speeding-up these processes and making them less prone to manual errors. OctopusDeploy has helped us realize these benefits by giving us the vehicle to deliver these enhancements.
Solution
Octopus is helping Tokio Marine HCC International streamline deployments to facilitate company growth
TMHCCI has used Octopus for several years to automate deployments and give teams autonomy. As a large and growing company, Octopus helps streamline and facilitate its growth.
Development teams use Octopus to self-serve deployments to non-production environments. The DevOps team use Octopus’s role-based access control (RBAC) to ensure only certain people can deploy to production. The compliance team also has requirements for who can deploy, and using Octopus makes this simple to enforce.
TMHCCI’s teams use many Octopus tools to help with consistency and reduce toil. They use step templates so they aren’t reinventing the wheel with each deployment, and also use customized steps fit for specific purposes. These templates help with consistency and efficiency. The teams also use runbooks in Octopus for maintenance and operational tasks. This includes creating monthly reports and refreshing and maintaining Azure DevOps (ADO) licenses.
Due to its size, TMHCCI is expanding its use of Octopus. The organization is taking time to establish documentation so teams can seamlessly run deployments themselves. TMHCCI plans to increase Octopus use from 220 to 500 projects over the coming years.
DevOps is a journey, and we can’t get everyone to do their own deployments straight away. It’s a step-by-step process that takes time. But using Octopus has helped us to empower various lines of business to do their own deployments.
Tokio Marine HCC International's CI/CD pipeline
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Value
Self-service to increase efficiency
The TMHCCI DevOps team manages hundreds of deployments every month, and to enhance their existing capabilities, they wanted to embed an automated process into their workflow.
Octopus is helping TMHCCI empower teams to run their own deployments. This means more frequent deployments to test environments and getting immediate feedback. As the company works on moving more projects to Octopus to implement self-service, this will continue to improve efficiency.
Because of Octopus, we are able to increase our deployment frequency even more as we start empowering people.
Improved developer experience
Automating deployments with Octopus has helped teams self-serve, which in turn has improved the experience for staff. Teams deploy more frequently and easily, and product owners have a better view of deployments to manage deliveries better. This also gives the wider business a better understanding of deployment status and provides greater transparency and control over the process.
Over time, this will further reduce manual deployments for the DevOps team, letting them focus on other improvement and optimization tasks.
We’ve had very positive feedback from teams because now, without having to resource, they can deploy all the way to Production in some cases, or at least deploy to non-production and get immediate feedback. It has really helped a lot.
Maintaining compliance with deployment automation
Compliance is a critical requirement for TMHCCI. Teams need to follow all processes and make sure all documentation is in place. Using Octopus has helped TMHCCI empower teams while maintaining compliance. Using RBAC, only those with permission to deploy have access to do so. It also provides traceability, with all deployments documented for auditing purposes.
It is critical for us to have a record of all deployments and that everything is traceable. Using Octopus ensures that everything you do is tracked which has been a huge help.