How Top Chinese Insurers Accelerated IT Efficiency with DevOps Maturity Models

Insurance Companies Using DevOps Maturity Model

Amid widespread digital transformation, enterprises adopt DevOps to boost IT efficiency. The "Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series, led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), provides high‑value guidance for evaluating and improving DevOps capabilities across industries.

Three leading insurance firms—People's Insurance Company of China (PICC), China Life Property Insurance, and Taikang Insurance—have completed DevOps capability maturity assessments, collectively contributing three projects.

Continuous Delivery (Standard 3) Certification Overview

China People's Insurance Distributed Core System Project

This project integrates cloud‑native and distributed technologies, aligning with PICC’s business characteristics. It adopts a three‑tier architecture (front‑end, middle‑end, back‑end) to build a service center, micro‑services, and meta‑services, enabling modular system construction and rapid adaptation to business model changes. Business processes such as underwriting, claims, sales, and service are re‑engineered for improved user experience.

Technically, the system is built on PICC’s self‑controlled distributed micro‑service framework (PDF‑C) and advanced distributed development frameworks and database technologies, ensuring high concurrency performance and stability.

Infrastructure-wise, a dedicated cloud model and container technology dramatically enhance horizontal scalability. Elastic resource scaling and rapid environment delivery support traffic spikes and marketing events. A cloud‑based platform with fast database replication provides multi‑active, multi‑center operation, enabling 2,000‑km remote intelligent traffic diversion and robust business continuity.

Taikang Insurance "Taikang Mall" System

The "Taikang Mall" system is not a brand‑new project but an extensive upgrade of a legacy system that suffered from poor scalability, maintainability, and stability. Rapid business growth rendered the old architecture incapable of meeting evolving requirements, prompting a comprehensive technical and management overhaul.

The team faced the challenge of building a new system while maintaining compatibility with existing code—akin to changing a car’s tires and engine simultaneously. They adopted a phased stripping and replacement strategy, using concrete business needs as entry points to gradually execute the plan, completing the transformation over more than two years.

China Life Property Insurance Agricultural Claims System Project

The agricultural claims system, a key next‑generation core business project, offers rich functionality, advanced technology, and user‑friendly operation. It supports the full claims lifecycle for four agricultural insurance types, achieving intelligent, automated, and fine‑grained claim processing.

Through DevOps Level‑3 continuous delivery assessment, the project achieved significant improvements across demand, development, testing, and deployment domains. Quality metrics include 100% unit‑test pass rate and 100% automated interface‑test coverage. Delivery efficiency improved with a roughly five‑day demand cycle, build times under 15 minutes, and automated build success rates above 90%.

DevOps Capability Maturity Model Overview

The "Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series, jointly developed by CAICT, the Cloud Computing Open Source Industry Alliance, the Efficient Operations Community, BATJ, and major financial, telecom, and internet enterprises, is the first comprehensive domestic and international DevOps standard. It has been officially released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and adopted by many leading enterprises.

In July 2020, the DevOps standard was concluded by the United Nations‑affiliated standardization body ITU‑T, becoming the world’s first international DevOps standard. The overall DevOps architecture covers 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.