Munich Re achieves greater audit capability with new CMDB

The world’s leading authority on risk
Munich Re stands for innovative strength and outstanding risk expertise. The company is driving digital transformation in the insurance industry worldwide, breaking new ground in risk assessment and developing new products and services for every new type of risk.

Munich Re takes care of risks of varying complexity and severity, whether it’s a rocket launch, cyberattack, or global pandemic, and is active in all lines of insurance worldwide. With more than 140 years of risk expertise and 40,000 employees in 50 countries, Munich Re is the reliable partner for the global insurance industry and its clients.

Meeting stringent regulations
Munich Re is at the forefront of the technology revolution that is transforming the insurance industry, both in the availability and power of data analytics in the understanding and calculation of risk, and in the development of ground-breaking digital products and services for clients.

Today’s financial institutions are also operating in an increasingly complex regulatory environment. Like every other financial organization in Germany, Munich Re must meet stringent requirements set by BaFin, the financial supervisory authority responsible for ensuring the stability and integrity of the German financial system. But it must also meet the regulations in other countries.

State-of-the-art visibility and control
As part of a major internal service and digital transformation program, Munich Re commissioned the development of a new, state-of-the-art ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB). It provides a consistent taxonomy for all configuration items used across Munich Re’s IT ecosystem. Centrally controlled, it enables automated access to all assets and data sources used groupwide. Previously, the IT teams used countless individual databases, often in manually maintained spreadsheets, and along with them, several homegrown applications to manage this data. “There was no end-to-end view of the business processes for the IT assets used across the group,” says Richard Fothergill, Global Head of IT Service Management, Munich Re.

Introducing a ServiceNow CMDB would not only deliver substantial process and efficiency benefits for the company by providing a consistent view of the group’s IT estate, but it would also enable it to respond precisely and at speed to all regulatory and audit data requirements.

Fast delivery thanks to ITOM Discovery
By developing a lean and agile approach, combined with a small pilot at one data center, ServiceNow and its London-based Premier Partner, CloudStratex, reduced the projected program timetable from 15 months to just nine, while delivering impressive results. With ITOM Discovery, 99% of all critical components of Munich Re’s IT environment were discovered automatically. “We expected 80% and achieved 99%, that’s fantastic,” enthuses Duncan Docherty, CTO, CloudStratex, adding that the team was only able to do this thanks to the behavior-led approach chosen. Being part of the capabilities proposed by ITOM Discovery, the behavior-led approach enables a quick grasp of all error patterns across the target estate by theme, rather than forcing the team to look at individual data centers one by one.

The program embraced more than 30 sites and data centers instead of the projected 15, and more than 30% more SQL databases were found than anticipated.

Trusting a golden source of truth
The ServiceNow CMDB is now trusted throughout Munich Re as the “golden source of truth”, with the capability to apply multiple criteria to extract all necessary data either from a business process perspective or for complete audit and regulatory compliance. “Before introducing the CMDB, it was difficult to determine what certain infrastructures and applications were used for, whether and why they were critical,” says Peter Schmidt, Head of Global ITSM Process and Tool Governance, Munich Re. “Today, with the accuracy of the automated discovery, we have a single-source-of-data model in place that provides reliable information on all assets used.”

Stakeholders throughout the business are enjoying productivity and efficiency benefits that centralized control, transparency, and user-friendly digital tools have delivered. And not only are domain users now turning to ServiceNow to see the state of their components; the CMDB has also created the foundation for process compliance reporting, thereby enabling Munich Re’s management to measure regulatory compliance and respond to auditors far more efficiently.

It has also significantly helped in creating a better understanding of dependencies and impact for incident and change management, helping to improve stability.

Benefits across the business worldwide
The program continues with ServiceNow Security Operations and Vulnerability Management soon to be added to reinforce Munich Re’s data protection and cybersecurity stance. In addition, Munich Re intends to industrialize the CMDB information for more than 1,000 applications groupwide, about 70% of which are expected to migrate to the public cloud by the end of 2023. This will result in the consolidation of all ITSM processes into ServiceNow. It will further strengthen the company’s digital support services through its IT service desk and enable a complete service mapping across all business domains. Munich Re has also recently implemented the rollout of ServiceNow Software Asset Management, leveraging the data now available in the CMDB.

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