Singapore and Malaysia-based insurance group Great Eastern has migrated 300 on-premise databases to on-premise Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) hardware.

In total, the company has moved 200 terabytes from 300 on-premise Oracle databases to Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer while still housed in its own data centers. This includes its financial product management systems, distributed commission management systems, and rewards systems, all of which are now in one single cloud-based platform.

Great Eastern has S$100 billion (US$73.3bn) in assets and more than 16 million policyholders, including 13 million from government schemes. As the company has grown, Great Eastern has needed to modernize and automate its on-premises database systems to improve scalability while still meeting regulatory requirements.

By using Exadata Cloud@Customer, Great Eastern hopes to automate and simplify its data management.

"The life insurance sector is increasingly leveraging technology to innovate, enhance consumer experiences, and boost operational efficiencies, ultimately improving individual protection and financial well-being," said Chin Ying Loong, regional managing director, ASEAN & South Asia Growing Economies, Oracle.

"With Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, Great Eastern can enjoy the flexibility and economic benefits of cloud in its own data centers, while helping to meet local regulatory requirements. This cloud migration strengthens Great Eastern's operations, powering them to stay at the forefront of Asia's insurance industry."

Gary Teh, managing director, Group IT, Great Eastern added: "We remain steadfast in our commitment to improving customer experience with product innovation to support the changing wealth and protection requirements of our customers across the region. This involves optimizing customer journeys through redesigned processes, harnessing our digitized assets, and leveraging advanced cloud capabilities."

Great Eastern is a subsidiary of OCBC Bank, the second-largest financial services group in Southeast Asia by assets.

In Q3 of 2017, OCBC launched a regional data center in Singapore that was custom-built to handle the bank's operations for the next 30 years. The data center sits 0.5 hectares of land with a built-up floor area of 134,500 sq ft (12,495 sqm) across six levels. The data center serves several of OCBC Group's subsidiaries, including Great Eastern.

That data center was later upgraded with a new cooling system to reduce its carbon footprint.

In 2022, Great Eastern talked to ComputerWeekly about its planned cloud migration. The company has been conducting a digital transformation since 2018. At the time, Great Eastern's Teh said that the company was making "painstaking" efforts to get rid of its legacy systems, including a general insurance core system that ran on an IBM AS/400. Teh also revealed that the company had built a private cloud, though was planning to operate a hybrid cloud environment in the future.