Executive Summary:


U.S. Leading retirement industry

Security Benefit was founded in 1892 and has a near 129-year track record of delivering successful insurance services. The Company offers life and health insurance, retirement plans, annuities, mutual funds, and related services. Security Benefit Life Insurance serves customers in the United States.

Customer challenge:

Security Benefits was using manual AWS operations for the EC2 instances deployment. It required developers to perform provisioning. All the interlocking systems and processes were managed manually, which consumed a lot of time. It also required resources with specialized skills. The entire process also involved multiple actions that had to be completed before deployment. The customer wanted ITTStar to find a faster, cost-effective, efficient, and more scalable solution. Security Benefit also wanted ITTStar to build an automated DevSecOps pipeline to increase their marketing efforts, improve security and increase operational stability and reliability.

Partner Solution:

ITTStar implemented the solution to this project by solving mainly four requirements.

  • CloudFormation templates for the EC2 instances, security groups, and EBS volumes were maintained in the GitLab repository.
  • The EC2 instance in AWS was deployed using CloudFormation templates via the GitLab pipeline. The mandatory tags attached to the instance were passed to the CloudFormation templates via .json files.
  • EC2, application-specific security groups, and EBS volume CloudFormation templates attached to an EC2 instance were maintained as a part of this project.
  • The main goal of this release was to provision EC2 instances in an automated way and reduce the time using CFN templates deployed via Gitlab. Since it used to take days for provisioning and onboarding the EC2 instances.

Why AWS?

AWS provides secure, reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services. CloudFormation is the AWS IaC tool that serves as an automation platform. It allows one to implement services or applications without having to set up and configure each service manually, saving considerable time and avoiding the potential for mistakes and inconsistencies.
Given its ease of use and wide-ranging capabilities, CloudFormation has helped the customer to automate the infrastructure management and focus on innovation. The customer was able to provision the EC2 instances along with domain joining within minutes through CFN templates deployed.

Why Security Benefit chose ITTStar?

Security Benefit chose ITTStar as their trusted partner in their digital transformation journey. They wanted an expert partner for data-driven innovation. ITTStar’s unique approach to solving complex infrastructure and security problems using cloud-native services and their ability to drive innovations attracted the customer to partner with them. As an AWS Select Partner, our confidence comes from our understanding of how to integrate AWS services into our solutions, combined with our broken-down approach to solving holistic business challenges.

Results & Benefits:

  • The automated end-to-end process of deploying an EC2 Instance with domain joining increased the speed, and efficiency.
  • Reduced the time of provisioning of EC2 instances that earlier used to take several days for configuring and onboarding the same.

About Security Benefit 

Security Benefit is a 125-year-old Kansas-based retirement company that has grown over the years to become one of the fastest-growing companies in the US retirement market. A combination of innovative products, superior investment management, and a unique marketing strategy has made Security Benefit the leader in its comprehensive range of retirement markets and wealth segments.

Customer Testimonial

ITTStar team was able successful in understanding the requirement for the Devsecops project, Automating of infrastructure deployment. Great improvement from Release 0 to Release 1. They started understanding the processes in our company and the end user goal for this project very well. They have been very proactive in most of the tasks and were able to deliver the work on time. I really appreciate their work and effort.


Sahithi Reddy Paspuleti,
AWS Solution Engineer,
Security Benefits