In 2002, Confused.com launched the first price comparison website for car insurance in the United Kingdom. In doing so, it disrupted a market that was traditionally difficult for consumers to navigate, offering a simplified process for finding great insurance quotes. Today the company offers a wide range of trusted household names for car insurance, home insurance, gas, electricity and other utilities, holiday and travel insurance, pet insurance, caravan insurance, and money products such as credit cards, savings and life insurance.
Keeping up with the cloud’s pace of change
Agility, cost control, and flexibility were the key business drivers behind Confused.com’s decision to move to the public cloud. While the company was able to realize these benefits and more with Azure, it also ran into some challenges from a monitoring perspective.
“We had a bit of a patchwork quilt of monitoring solutions,” says Andrew Brockway, head of infrastructure and operations at Confused.com. “This was fine when we were hosting on premise in a dedicated data center because we had a much smaller footprint. But since we went to Azure, we found those solutions were a bit cumbersome. They couldn’t keep up with the rate of change in terms of how the platform evolves and how the changes that we deploy evolve.”
In addition to keeping up with a dynamic environment, Confused.com also needed a way to keep technical and non-technical teams on the same page. Non-technical stakeholders involved in product development projects, for example, didn’t have a simple way to get answers to their questions. “They weren’t empowered to get the data for themselves, and felt left out of the overall process,” says Graham Schultz, head of product development at Confused.com.
The company needed a way to not only consolidate its monitoring tools, but also give non-technical teams a way to understand how technical changes are impacting what they’re trying to do from a business perspective.