MetLife reduces automated development security operations tests and builds to under an hour with Azure DevOps

Always with you, building a more confident future—that’s MetLife’s purpose. As a global leader in the financial services industry that provides insurance, annuities, employee benefits, and asset management, MetLife is dedicated to changing how its customers experience insurance by making it simpler, smarter, and designed around them. 

With years of rich data and insights, MetLife can uncover patterns and predict behaviors that help it design products and services that flex as its customers’ needs and lives change. In Asia, MetLife serves millions of individual and institutional insurance customers across Australia, Bangladesh, China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, South Korea, and Vietnam. Given the need for compliance and security in the financial services industry and the speed at which the industry was modernizing, MetLife’s Asia developers were determined to implement industry best practices for development security operations (DevSecOps) across the region. Their goal was clear: to enhance the security, efficiency, and quality of their software development cycle.

Initially, though, the developers faced considerable challenges. While they were already using Microsoft Azure DevOps, the teams were also using manual processes. The manual tests and the subsequent uploading of each build could take up to eight hours to complete, with error detection often happening after deployment was finished. This inefficiency was a significant drawback in an industry that demands agility and precision. 

“Our development teams across the organization create seamless experiences for our customers and associates,” says Siew Choo Soh, Asia CIO. “Part of my role is to drive technology transformation to change the way technology resources work, deliver, and deploy solutions. This also involves ensuring that development teams are up to date with the latest and best DevOps practices and tools to ensure that only high quality and secure code is deployed into production for the various app landscapes that we have.”

Expanding the use of a trusted platform

MetLife’s Asia development teams were already using Microsoft Azure as its trusted core platform, making it a natural foundation for its transformative plans. The teams expanded on Azure DevOps to standardize build pipelines for continuous integration and deployments (CI/CD). Azure DevOps is a tool that accelerates the building, testing, and deployment of applications by bringing the development and operations teams together for smooth and seamless software delivery.

Prior to Azure, the growing size and number of applications made scaling while optimizing cost a daunting challenge for the MetLife teams. To get ahead of these scaling issues, they wanted to align all teams onto a reference standard that would enable high levels of developer productivity and a more secure way of deploying applications to the production environments. Azure DevOps provided the MetLife teams with a suite of tools that revolutionized their approach. 

The flexibility of Azure Boards enabled the teams to track work comprehensively and improve project management. Custom add-ons from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace helped the teams maximize the use of the tool for many things including sprint planning, where teams come together to plan out the steps to delivering a new product. Azure Repos offered secure, scalable Git repositories for managing the source code. Azure Pipelines automated the build and deployment processes, significantly reducing manual labor and error rates and helping set branch policies. With Azure Pipelines, the developers have been able to incorporate security scans and code quality checks, which speed up the process lifecycle. Pipelines also deployed their application to the target environment. The new process took fewer than six months to implement, with teams taking advantage of these tools to provide end-to-end traceability. 

MetLife’s Asia development teams mainly develop Java and ReactJS mobile applications that center around customer care, such as policy registration, profile updates, policy inquiries, and even claim submissions. MetLife’s award-winning apps also support health-related, value-added services such as scheduling a doctor’s appointment and even making video calls directly with a doctor. 

Teams across the region collaborated using a test-and-learn approach and partnered with Microsoft engineers to overcome obstacles and incorporate best DevSecOps practices into its CI/CD value stream. MetLife organized training—Dojo and bootcamps sessions—to ensure that the enablement of the teams was done in the most systematic and scalable manner. They worked with Microsoft partner Aware Group and engaged MetLife’s engineering leads to create the best-in-class lifecycle along with the quality thresholds. The Asia development teams’ aim was to automate and integrate these quality models into the pipelines as much as possible to ensure a seamless implementation of the desired standards. 

Transforming DevOps

Azure DevOps has changed MetLife’s Asia development operations in dramatic ways. Since rolling out the new platform, completion times for automated tests and builds have been reduced from just under eight hours to under an hour in many cases. Regularly scheduled scans improve code quality and support security, ensuring that any vulnerabilities are addressed promptly. These scans also save approximately 15 minutes per build per developer and help detect errors earlier. MetLife’s Asia developers believe they can catch up to 15% more errors by integrating these best practices earlier in the development process. The ability to rapidly deploy changes and new features have significantly improved MetLife’s responsiveness to market changes and customer needs. This agility is critical in the competitive insurance market.

“By continually improving our release process, we’re able to better protect customer information,” remarks Soh. MetLife is a company entrusted with the data of millions of customers worldwide, so protecting information is its most important job. ”We can deliver outstanding experiences by reducing the time between releasing new products and features to our customers without compromising security or quality. Microsoft Azure DevOps has helped our business practices become more robust."

In embracing Azure DevOps, MetLife has not only addressed its immediate operational challenges but also laid a strong foundation for future growth and transformation. Soh says, “The improvements have made our teams even more cooperative and inclusive and have helped enable faster responses to external changes and customer needs. Teams also receive real-time status data and trending performance of releases, projects, and sprints, enabling quicker and more informed decision-making and collaboration. The streamlining of processes and implementation of best practices via Microsoft Azure DevOps represents our commitment to continually grow and develop our infrastructure and processes, and most importantly, our commitment to our people at MetLife.” 

Discover more about MetLife on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn.