Eight on-premises data centres. One Azure landing zone.
Tier-1 insurance group - full infrastructure migration from on-premises to Azure across five CEE markets, covering core insurance, claims, DWH, CRM, document management, and HR/ERP systems.
A tier-1 CEE insurance group ran its entire operation - core policy platform, claims processing, data warehouse, CRM, document management, and ERP - across owned server infrastructure in five countries. Hardware refresh cycles, per-country maintenance contracts, and siloed disaster recovery consumed a significant share of IT budget with no elasticity.
Regulatory pressure for data residency compliance across SK, CZ, PL, HU, and RO added complexity to any migration path. Five national supervisory frameworks, each with distinct requirements, had to be satisfied simultaneously - not sequentially.
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Designed a multi-region Azure landing zone with per-country subscription boundaries satisfying local data residency requirements across SK, CZ, PL, HU, and RO - hub-and-spoke network topology with centralized security controls and policy enforcement applied uniformly across all five markets.
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Defined a migration wave strategy across 7 workload tiers: legacy core insurance platform (rehost), claims processing (rehost + managed database), data warehouse (re-platform to cloud-native analytics), CRM (rehost), document management (re-platform to object storage + search), HR/ERP (rehost), and ancillary services (containerized).
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Produced a full architecture governance package - ADRs for every major platform decision, a RACI matrix across Darkbloom, client IT, and three third-party implementation vendors, and a shared technical standards document used as the binding contract between all parties throughout the 18-month programme.
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Designed and partially implemented the core network layer, CI/CD pipelines, and the centralized logging and monitoring stack - then handed off to implementation vendors with detailed runbooks covering operational procedures, escalation paths, and configuration standards for each component.
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Ran architectural oversight across 18 months of multi-vendor implementation: design review gates before each migration wave, an incident escalation path for architecture-breaking decisions, and a formal change control process covering 200+ infrastructure components across all five markets.
Reduction in total infrastructure cost within 12 months post-migration - hardware refresh cycles, DC leases, and per-country maintenance contracts eliminated.
Less IT maintenance overhead - hardware refresh cycles, patching, and per-country data centre contracts replaced by managed cloud operations.
Siloed per-country DR plans consolidated into a single Azure-native DR strategy covering all five markets from a unified control plane.
Regulatory findings across five national supervisory reviews post-migration - data residency requirements satisfied in every jurisdiction.
The group entered the post-migration phase with a single cloud governance model instead of five IT organisations pulling in different directions.
- Zero regulatory findings across five national supervisory reviews. Data residency was satisfied structurally - through per-country subscription boundaries enforced at the platform level - not through manual compliance checks applied after the fact.
- The architecture governance package outlived the engagement. ADRs, technical standards, and the RACI matrix continued to govern the client's cloud evolution after Darkbloom's involvement ended - giving the internal team a reference they could own and extend independently.
- 18 months of multi-vendor delivery with no architecture regressions. Design review gates before each migration wave caught breaking decisions before they reached production - keeping three implementation vendors aligned on a shared technical contract throughout.
We had three vendors, five regulatory frameworks, and eight data centres to decommission. Darkbloom gave us the architecture and the governance structure to hold it all together - and the discipline to keep three implementation teams on the same page for eighteen months.- Group CTO · Tier-1 Insurance Group · CEE (private)