Future in Focus: How Zywave Turned Legacy Pain into Product Innovation

Overview

Data Centralization through Data Warehousing

THE CHALLENGE

After acquiring a legacy app with outdated infrastructure and recurring issues, Zywave faced failed migrations and instability, hindering its cloud strategy and customer trust.

THE SOLUTION

Zywave partnered with Ollion to stabilize legacy systems, enable cloud strategy, modernize infrastructure, enhance security, cut costs, and prepare for future growth and scalability.

THE OUTCOME

Ollion transformed Zywave’s legacy system into a stable, scalable, cloud-native platform—cutting costs, reducing outages, enabling innovation, and aligning with AWS for future growth.

About the Business

Zywave is the leading enabler of digital quoting in the insurance industry, helping insurers, agents, and brokers deliver seamless, end-to-end digital distribution.

With over 15,000 customers across more than 10 countries, Zywave empowers its clients to enhance service delivery, streamline workflows, and drive measurable growth.

The Business Challenge

Following a strategic acquisition, Zywave inherited a legacy application hosted in an aging data center, reliant on expiring resources and an outdated architecture. Frequent outages and performance issues had begun to erode customer trust. Previous attempts to modernize or migrate the application had failed—some even leaving the product in worse shape.

The result was a business-critical asset that was unstable, unsustainable, and standing in the way of Zywave’s broader cloud strategy.

The Ollion Solution

Zywave needed a scalable, secure, and future-ready solution that would deliver immediate stability—and pave the way for long-term growth. Ollion partnered with Zywave to not only stabilize the product but also enable a cloud strategy that would unlock agility, cost savings, and customer confidence.

Laying the Foundation for Growth

We began by deploying our Landing Zone Accelerator, establishing a secure, automated AWS environment with integrations into Zywave’s existing ecosystem—including data centers and Azure. This built-in flexibility allowed for seamless interoperability across platforms and positioned Zywave for future migrations and modernization initiatives.

Modernizing the Application Stack

The legacy LAMP stack was containerized and redeployed using Kubernetes (EKS) and Helm, with custom configurations for enhanced performance and reliability. The database layer was replatformed from an expensive on-prem MariaDB cluster to Amazon Aurora MySQL, slashing infrastructure costs while improving scalability. End-to-end CI/CD automation was introduced via GitLab and Octopus, streamlining testing, image builds, vulnerability scanning, and feature-flagged deployments.

Enhancing Security and Performance

Security was re-architected with a principle of Least Privileged Access, implemented via Terraform and ABAC IAM policies. Network integration through AWS Transit Gateway and security groups strengthened posture across the board. Critical legacy dependencies were rehosted, even without source code access, and a multi-phase data migration ensured application continuity with improved performance. Monitoring was established using AWS CloudWatch, Managed Grafana, and Observe for real-time insight and alerting.

The transformation wasn’t just technical—it was cultural. Our team now has greater ownership of the product and is even more empowered to drive innovation. With modern DevOps capabilities in place, we're deploying updates multiple times a day enabling us to move faster, iterate smarter, and maximize the positive impact we have on our customers.

Jennifer Parker, Vice President, Product Development at Zywave

The Results

Ollion’s work delivered a complete transformation of Zywave’s legacy environment—from fragile and costly to stable, scalable, and cloud-native.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in projected annual savings through infrastructure right-sizing and database modernization
Dramatic reduction in outages—down to just one major incident annually post-migration
Accelerated product innovation—freeing developers to focus on future-forward refactoring and reporting capabilities
Strategic AWS alignment—with consolidated environments, volume-based discounts, and a clear path for broader cloud adoption

Today, the formerly fragile legacy product is a foundation for growth—and a model for how Zywave plans to scale future acquisitions and services on AWS.