While some companies only tried to survive during the COVID-19 pandemic, others decided to invest even more in their transformation and innovation projects to better face the disruption and prepare for the future.

Health insurance provider Anthem Inc. signed an agreement with IBM in March 2020 to further modernize its IT infrastructure and infuse more AI into core processes through “Project Cirrus,” an expansion of the multi-decade partnership between the companies.

“We did about 80% of the end-to-end delivery for Anthem from a managed services perspective,” said Rick Smith (pictured), chief technology officer, IBM Anthem client team, at IBM. “We said, ‘We think we could improve this if we had the entire 100%, so Project Cirrus was about extending from 80% to 100%.”

The project was also about taking a series of applications that were important to Anthem and  transforming them 100% to cloud.

Smith, who has been on the IBM Anthem team for about 15 years, spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during IBM Think. They discussed Anthem’s goals with Project Cirrus, the achievements so far, and the role of the Anthem Technology Excellence Center. (* Disclosure below.)

Enterprise hybrid cloud as a service

Anthem needed to consolidate multiple legacy IT systems and shift targeted solutions to cloud computing. Therefore, one of the Project Cirrus’ commitment was to close Anthem’s five strategic data centers, with about 24,000 hosts, and move them to either IBM Cloud or close to IBM Cloud.

The solution is what Smith has deemed “enterprise hybrid cloud-as-a-service.”

“Normally hybrid cloud says you have a client data center location and you have cloud, [and] we marry the two together,” he explained. “We said we’re not going to have a data center location anymore; we’re going to have our data centers, IBM Cloud, and we’re actually going to put some dedicated space right next to cloud. And when I say next to cloud, I literally mean within a few feet.”

The idea was to allow the seamless move of non-traditional workloads to the cloud while improving operations, according to Smith.

“And if there’s any concerns over data security, compliance or healthcare regulated industry, of course, we can have the workloads located in the best location to ensure that security is in place,” he said. “We can kind of hit every layer that’s possible from having it just as secure as completely privatized to going directly over to public cloud or connecting the two together as we go along.”

An unintended benefit of this process was that the IT team had to reevaluate hosts that were in the data center and were not seen for a long period of time.

“This gives us an opportunity to also work with our teams and find things that really can just be thrown away, and this is great because we’re actually making them more efficient, optimizing the cost structures as we go about it,” Smith concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Think. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for IBM Think. Neither IBM, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE