WWK Lebensversicherung relies on a uniform archiving platform from kgs

Neu-Isenburg, May 24, 2023 - Together with KGS Software GmbH, WWK Lebensversicherung has set up a fail-safe archive including a disaster recovery scenario with three locally separate data centers. The aim is to improve flexibility when accessing the archive data and to reduce support costs. 

Insurance contracts sometimes run for many decades and accordingly they have to be archived in an audit- and Bafin- compliant manner. In the past WWK Lebensversicherung relied on three Dell ECS systems. 

A bundle of change requirements finally led to WWK saying goodbye to its old concept and switching to the lean archive approach of kgs and its content server. The biggest challenge was that the migration had to run parallel to business operations without interrupting them. A dual strategy was therefore chosen: while the new customer information portal was already being operated by kgs, all the remaining applications were still connected to the old archive. Since the insurance is certified according to ISO27001 according to BSI basic protection and the migration process was logged, the requirements of the auditors were also met. 

This "intelligent archiving" is based on ArchiveLink® and is able to connect a wide variety of specialized applications with the archiving solution. WWK can therefore store and search far more than just documents and data from the customer and sales information portal in the kgs archive tia®.

It is also possible to integrate log files or system logs from various other systems as well as documents from the BiPro portal solution, a piece of software that is used to supply sales partners of WWK Lebensversicherung with information. 

Archive access from new web portals 

Since the switchover, all archive requests from the web portals have been forwarded to kgs' own WriteCache server, which is installed in front of the actual archive. This not only communicates with the portals, but also directly with other WWK applications, such as SAP. So, even if the insurance company runs its entire core business of policy administration using proprietary industry software, SAP is still used for the management of incoming invoices and personnel data. Also, the document management system is required to index documents with metadata records from the insurance core application and to store them in the archive. The tia® Document Router is part of the WWK archive solution. The insurance company used it before the big archive migration to read scanned indexed objects from a drive and then store them via SAP. Today, the tia® H5 Viewer is used successfully to display documents in the SAP area.