NetFoundry wins Cloud-Native Connectivity Award for life insurance in SBR's first-ever TEA

The innovative company bagged the Cloud-Native Connectivity Award for life insurance during Singapore Business Review’s recently concluded Technology Excellence Awards.

NetFoundry was a key player in the digital transformation goal of FWD Insurance, one of the leading and fastest growing insurers in the Asia Pacific, providing the company with a cloud-native, highly-secure, and performant option that requires no hardware or physical networks, making it stand out from traditional approaches.

Because of this, the innovative company bagged the award for Cloud-Native Connectivity to AWS Cloud for life insurance during Singapore Business Review’s recently concluded Technology Excellence Awards.

“NetFoundry's cloud-native connectivity has been the perfect match to aid FWD on our digital transformation and cloud-native application journey. The NetFoundry platform enables us to spin up networks in minutes, across any set of edges and clouds, without any dependencies on telcos, hardware or private circuits. The resultant programmable, zero trust, high-performance application connections has delighted both our internal and external customers,” said Narsi Partha, CTO of FWD.

NetFoundry, a division of Tata Communications, offers a cloud-native software-based network platform-as-a-service that allows businesses to run without private circuits as well as build their own wide area networks in order to optimise the application delivery of cloud and internet of things (IoT) services.

“NetFoundry’s innovative platform is today helping all those companies who have started their digital transformation journey but struggling to have the right network transformation tool to become either true cloud-native organisation or find the similar agility of cloud in order to spin a network with performance optimisation & data-in-motion security for their projects at significantly lower cost,” explained Dipesh Ranjan, Head of APAC for NetFoundry.

Forbes dubbed NetFoundry as a sexy, innovative startup, noting its ability to enable businesses to reliably and securely run applications anywhere and everywhere, without being tied down by the costs, complexity and delays of traditional networking.

“The level of efficiency we will gain from working with NetFoundry is understated,” Chaki Abi Saab, OSM Maritime Group - Asia Pacific’s chief technology officer, said in a testimony. “Today, all industries have one commonality, and it is critical to give everyone in the ability to access all applications when they need to, whenever they need to, no matter where they are and they need to have this access securely,” he added.

Revolutionising the process of connecting applications, NetFoundry connects applications with its AppWAN, which uses app-connections-as-code, an app paradigm that serves mesh architecture such as Dev and DevOps, among others.

NetFoundry prides itself in providing accelerated digital transformation of cloud applications and reducing costs by completely eradicating the need for Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) as well as other physical networks. It also improves security profile with a zero-trust networking strategy.

“NetFoundry has enabled us to migrate our applications and large data files...without the need for cumbersome VPNs or expensive direct connect / MPLS circuits. This has increased our internal productivity, accelerated time to market, and enabled us to compete as a modern digital enterprise,” Dave Ulmer, MD Pictures - Asia Pacific digital head, said in a testimony.

With all this, the company’s application-specific networks became a game-changer in the digital transformation strategy of FWD Insurance. FWD is centred on creating fresh and modern customer experiences with products that are easy to understand and are supported by digital technology.

The Singapore-based insurer was exploring connectivity options to support its cloud infrastructure strategy, which was part of its digital transformation objective. Scouring the market, the only options available were too costly and lacked deployment agility. NetFoundry came in with a cloud-native, highly-secure, performant option, with application-specific networks that deliver zero-trust fabric overlay that was naturally multidirectional. No hardware or physical networks were required either, as the innovative solution only needed the insurer’s existing internet links.

Additionally, it can also be set up in minutes, as opposed to the traditional six to eight weeks needed for deployment. NetFoundry is today implemented for multi-application environment deployment, including unified communications and other critical cloud-native applications.

With this, NetFoundry showcased cost reduction and sharpened the digital edge the insurer has been striving for in its vision. Clients who purchase NetFoundry are usually business units that require solutions for their enterprises, ISV or app developers who wish to build secure-by-design connectivity into their application and cloud project teams who desire to get programmable cloud connections within their DevOps tooling.

Recognising Singapore’s leading companies in technology innovation, the Technology Excellence Awards lauds outstanding companies that have pioneered groundbreaking IT products and solutions and companies that implemented avant-garde technology initiatives that made an impact in their business.

The Technology Excellence Awards, presented by Singapore Business Review, was held on 30 May 2019 at the Conrad Centennial Singapore.

This year’s nominations were judged by a panel consisting of Cheang Wai Keat, Head of Advisory, Ernst & Young LLP; Darwin Thio, Director, Cybersecurity & Technology Services, Nexia TS; Daryl Pereira, Head of Cybersecurity, KPMG; Evelyn Lim, Executive Director, Tax Advisory, BDO LLP; and Jonathan Kok, Co-Head of Technology, Media & Communications Industry Group, RHTLaw Taylor Wessing LLP.

Check out the event photos during the awards night here.

If you would like to join the 2020 awards and be acclaimed for your company’s exceptional technology innovations, please email Julie Anne Nuñez at julie@charltonmediamail.com