How TaiKang Insurance Leveraged DevOps to Boost IT Efficiency in 2020

To improve enterprise IT governance and promote industry experience sharing, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology hosted the “2020 GOLF+ IT New Governance Leadership Forum” on December 23, 2020 in Beijing, supported by the China Communications Standardization Association, China Internet Association, and the Cloud Computing Standards and Open‑Source Promotion Committee.

The forum invited leaders from the Academy, the Communications Standardization Association, the Internet Association, and various IT experts. It also announced the 2020 industry leader awards, naming TaiKang Insurance Group Co., Ltd. as the 2020 Financial Leader Enterprise.

Q: Congratulations on being selected as the 2020 industry leader. Could you introduce your company?

A: TaiKang Insurance Group Co., Ltd., founded in 1996 and headquartered in Beijing, has grown into a large financial‑insurance service group covering insurance, asset management, and health‑care. Its subsidiaries include TaiKang Life, TaiKang Assets, TaiKang Pension, TaiKang Health Investment, and TaiKang Online, covering personal insurance, internet property insurance, asset management, corporate and occupational pensions, medical‑elderly care, health management, and commercial real estate. TaiKang has appeared on the Fortune Global 500 list for three consecutive years. The group actively implements the Healthy China strategy, integrates insurance payment with health‑care services, and builds a health‑industry ecosystem. Guided by the principle “serve the public, give back to society,” TaiKang emphasizes corporate social responsibility, embeds technology‑driven innovation, and since 2017 has introduced a DevOps platform and practice to integrate IT development and operations.

Q: What outstanding IT projects and highlights did your company achieve in 2020?

A: Guided by the technology‑driven business strategy, TaiKang introduced DevOps management concepts and advanced technical practices. In 2020, the TDS platform was built and put into production, achieving online and automated delivery, improving deployment efficiency by 60%. An engineering metric system was established, greatly enhancing visibility of development processes. The platform now serves over 4,000 developers across the group and subsidiaries, supporting more than 500 applications and over 5,000 end‑to‑end delivery pipelines. The pension mall project, leveraging these technical foundations, passed the DevOps maturity level‑3 assessment, introduced deep automated testing (boosting test efficiency by 50%), implemented strong quality gates (raising development quality by 40%), and improved overall delivery efficiency by 25%.

Q: What major challenges did you face in 2020, and how did you overcome them?

A: 2020 was a special year with intense pressure, but it also yielded results. The DevOps rollout went through research, requirement gathering, solution design, and platform construction, with pilot projects running in parallel. Challenges included cross‑department and cross‑subsidiary coordination, integration of commercial and open‑source toolchains requiring significant investment and expertise, building a metric system from scratch, and adapting existing development, framework, organization, and management models to the new DevOps culture. The team invested heavily in coordination mechanisms, platform development, and remote support during the pandemic, ensuring continuous high‑efficiency delivery.

Q: What new IT plans does the company have for 2021?

A: In 2021, TaiKang will continue to promote DevOps best practices and advanced technologies across the group and subsidiaries, aiming for faster business value release. Key initiatives include developing the TDS 3.0 end‑to‑end delivery pipeline with template‑based creation, flexible customization, and visual orchestration; integrating Kubernetes to support DevOps; establishing traceable delivery standards via artifact repositories; and improving engineering efficiency metrics (CI/CD automation rate, build speed, release success rate, delivery visualization, code quality) by 30%. The company will also explore DevSecOps and ChatOps integration, enhance industry influence, foster innovation, improve software delivery quality and efficiency, and strengthen engineer culture to support digital transformation.