Cloud-first + Domain-Driven Design = Insurance Industry's Success Story
- Sam Martindale
- May 19
- 4 min read
Updated: May 21
Overview
Insurance Safety Consultants (ISC) provides high-quality loss prevention services to insurance, public, and private industries across the United States. Insurance consultants service multiple clients at various locations. They use an internal system to get up-to-date information, communicate with the coordinators and clients, feed their findings, and participate in the workflow, ensuring timely and quality service. To address these needs, the system needs to be tailored to the specifics of the domain, simple to use, and reliably support business operations 24/7.
The key aspects of the system could be divided into the following categories.
Request registration
Request processing
Quality Assurance
Billing
Client invoicing
Consultants invoicing
Client reporting
The critical demands for the system were
Web-based UI for staff, consultants, and clients
A simple-to-use system that doesn't require significant technical skills
Integrations with 3rd party for automated workflows
Role-based access and per-request granular permissions
Minimize IT investment and management costs with cloud architecture and implementation
Challenges
ISC has faced several challenges in the business and technology spaces. Afterman Software resolved the issue holistically rather than focusing solely on the technology.
Business
A small and fiscally responsible business that didn't want to waste money on endless IT projects
Highly custom workflow that didn't fit any of the existing off-the-shelf products
Staff who needed to be able to use the new system w/o retraining investment
Remove tedious and manual tasks with automation where possible
Technical
Buy vs. build. A robust business-specific workflow would require high tuning of commercial off-the-shelf software or a significant development investment
An attempted rewrite of the original system that did not yield successful results
Extensibility to enable 3rd party integrations, including support for the upcoming integrations (LC360, RCT, etc.)
Approach
Considering the business and technological requirements, the approach selected and executed is known as event modelling and domain-driven design. Closely working with the ISC, Afterman Software has analyzed the business flows, identifying aggregate roots that would encapsulate the logic and the system's behaviour.
This has enabled conducting event modelling sessions to capture the intrinsic details associated with every workflow, comprising ISC's entire business model.
This resulted in a high-fidelity implementation of the required functionality, accurately expressing every business behaviour with functional software, validated throughout the development iterations.
A cloud-first approach has enabled ISC to reduce its IT investment on this project to the bare minimum. With Azure as the cloud of choice, ISC has swiftly spun up test and production environments, using a phased approach of developing, testing, and releasing to production in a controlled manner that worked for the business while adhering to the best practices of modern software development.
The original system, implemented with PHP as a monolithic CRUD application, has failed to provide the extensibility and feature support the business needs. An internal rewrite attempt hasn't offered much of a resolution due to the issues of a data-oriented approach to a system that requires affinity to the business workflows and behaviour while being implemented with a technology mature enough to support the evolving requirements over time. Afterman Software has chosen .NET and Blazor Web Assembly as the technology stack to address this, with Event Sourcing as the foundational architecture pattern.
To enable business continuity, in addition to building out the system, the historical data was converted into events, ensuring years of the original system were not discarded and could be seamlessly integrated into the new system.
Technologies used
.NET is the foundational technology for backend and frontend.
ASP.NET Core for the backend API
Azure App Hosting (Linux) for hosting the solution
Blazor Web Assembly for the frontend
Azure Functions for serverless compute
Azure Storage (Blobs, Tables) for documents and event store
Azure Service Bus for events, fault-tolerant reply facility
Azure MySQL Flex database
Code-first PDF generation
Azure Application Insights for traceability and system monitoring (alerts)
Results
Since the launch of TVA, the results have exceeded the client's expectations, even after just two years in production. The system has proven robust, reliable, and user-friendly, supporting business operations without outages or failures and providing predictive budgeting.
Business
Self-proficiency. ISC removed any need for internal IT to maintain its mission-critical system.
Reliability. Operational status 24/7 with no outages due to software.
Self-service. Consultants, coordinators, and clients utilizing the system w/o the need for support or training.
Onboarding new business. There have been new integrations with partners since the launch of the system.
Worry-free data backup and retention. System data integrity and security are guaranteed with SaaS services on Azure.
Complete traceability of all events in the system. Detailed insights into the system eliminated any blind spots.
IT
Seamless technology migration. The system was launched on .NET 6 and migrated to .NET 8 later.
Monitoring and troubleshooting. Hosting on Azure has made resolving infrastructure-related issues trivial, with minimal to no investment.
Third-party integrations. With .NET and Azure services, the complexity of integrating third parties has been dissolved, allowing ISC to expand its business instead of focusing on technology.
