How Leading Chinese Insurers Use DevOps Maturity Models to Boost IT Efficiency

Amid widespread digital transformation, enterprises adopt DevOps to enhance IT efficiency; the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) leads the "R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series, offering high‑value guidance for evaluating and advancing IT capabilities.

Insurance Companies Assessed with the DevOps Maturity Model

Three leading insurers—People's Insurance Company of China (PICC), China Life Property Insurance, and Taikang Insurance—have completed DevOps capability assessments, totaling three projects.

Continuous Delivery (Level 3) Certification Status

People's Insurance Company of China – Distributed Core System Project

The project integrates cloud‑native, distributed technologies with PICC’s business characteristics, featuring a three‑tier architecture (front‑end, middle‑end, back‑end) that builds services via modular micro‑services and meta‑services, enabling rapid adaptation to changing business models. Technically, it relies on PICC’s proprietary PDF‑C distributed micro‑service framework and advanced database technologies to ensure high concurrency performance and stability. Infrastructure-wise, a private‑cloud and container strategy provides elastic scaling, multi‑active, multi‑center operation, supporting up to 2,000 km of remote traffic diversion for continuous business availability.

Taikang Insurance – “Taikang Mall” System

The "Taikang Mall" platform is an evolution of a legacy system, addressing scalability, maintainability, and stability issues. Rapid business growth rendered the old architecture incapable of meeting new demands, prompting a comprehensive technical and process overhaul. The team adopted a phased stripping and replacement strategy, using business‑driven requirements to incrementally replace legacy code while maintaining compatibility, ultimately completing the transformation over two years.

China Life Property Insurance – Agricultural Claims System Project

This next‑generation core business system offers rich functionality, advanced technology, and user‑friendly design, covering the full claims lifecycle for four agricultural insurance types. Through DevOps Level 3 continuous delivery assessment, the project achieved significant improvements across demand, development, testing, and deployment, attaining 100% unit‑test pass rate, 100% automated API‑test coverage, a five‑day average delivery cycle, build times under 15 minutes, and over 90% automated build success.

References

PICC Distributed Core System achieves DevOps Level 3 continuous delivery

Taikang Insurance’s Taikang Mall achieves DevOps Level 3 continuous delivery

China Life Property Insurance’s Agricultural Claims System achieves DevOps Level 3 continuous delivery

About the DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The "R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series, led by CAICT together with the Cloud Computing Open Source Industry Alliance, Efficient Operations Community, BATJ, and major financial and telecom enterprises, is the first comprehensive DevOps standard in China and a globally recognized reference. Adopted by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, it has been implemented by numerous leading firms across finance, telecom, and internet sectors.

In July 2020, the DevOps standard was formally concluded by the United Nations‑affiliated ITU‑T, becoming the world’s first international DevOps standard. The overall DevOps architecture comprises processes (agile management, continuous delivery, technical operations), application design, security and risk management, systems and tools, business value management, collaborative development‑operations, and continuous testing.