HAPEV Closes a Skills Gap; Drives Seamless Compliance and Agile Operations with Aviatrix

Hamburger Pensionsverwaltung (HAPEV) is a full-service pension provider. HAPEV manages company pension plans for over 4,000 companies in Germany and administers over one million pension and retirement accounts. They are responsible for around 30 pension funds, including the largest mutual company pension fund in Germany with around 800,000 members.

This trust demands operational excellence and technological resilience, which drove HAPEV's strategic transition to a fully cloud-based infrastructure distributed across AWS and Azure.

The move to hybrid cloud

HAPEV's cloud journey began with a practical business need: establishing a backup data center location for business continuity and regulatory compliance. While evaluating AWS to mirror their existing Nutanix cluster, they discovered the flexibility and simplicity of cloud environments compared to their costly and troublesome physical data center. As HAPEV expanded their virtual desktop infrastructure requirements, they quickly provisioned additional cloud resources and decided to pursue a comprehensive cloud strategy spanning both AWS and Azure.

The IT team recognized early on that managing networking across multiple cloud service providers (CSPs) would require learning different sets of complex networking concepts. They needed a cloud-agnostic solution that could deliver unified management, scalable network architecture, reliable redundancy for business continuity, and infrastructure as code functionality. The AviatrixSecure High-Performance Datacenter Edge is a software -defined solution deployed as virtual appliances, giving HAPEV centralized control, high-performance encryption, and secure connectivity across clouds and data centers.“With Aviatrix, instead of learning different sets of networking concepts, we have a single management plane for connectivity,” said Radu, Network & Security Engineer at HAPEV.

Aviatrix Secure High-Performance Datacenter Edge delivers secure edge-to-cloud connectivity. Simple to provision, deploy, and manage, Aviatrix allows the HAPEV team to simply and flexibly connect resources running anywhere over a common encrypted framework that spans clouds and data centers. High-performance encryption over private or public connectivity boosts security and performance. Aviatrix’s automatedIaC deployments provide consistent configurations, cut setup time, and reduce disruptions, ensuring reliable performance across hybrid environments. The unified management console gives HAPEV the power to oversee and orchestrate complex hybrid networks for streamlined operations and improved efficiency.

Mature multicloud management

As HAPEV's cloud adoption accelerated, their business operations demanded greater network performance than their initial connections could support. Aviatrix's high-performance encryption(HPE) became a crucial business enabler, delivering both the enhanced throughput and security HAPEV needed to operate efficiently at scale.

By eliminating traditional IPsec throughput bottlenecks while maintaining robust encryption, Aviatrix enabled encrypted data movement across cloud environments and between clouds and on-premises systems, with centralized control to simplify operations.

"Aviatrix high-performance encryption has enabled us to meet our increasing throughput demands with significantly faster network speeds," said Marcel, IT Solution Architect at HAPEV. "We've substantially reduced backup times for our backup appliances, which has improved our operational efficiency."

With Aviatrix integrated into HAPEV’s development workflows, network connectivity is now provisioned as code. This gives the DevOps team the ability to spin up secure, production-ready environments quickly. “With the Aviatrix IaC capabilities, our DevOps team can configure the infrastructure for new workloads in less than an hour,” said Radu. “This enables us to respond faster to business needs regardless of which cloud platform we're using.”

Enabling zero trust principles

Looking ahead, HAPEV plans to implement zero trust security principles across its cloud infrastructure.Much like earlier cloud transitions, this evolution will be phased. Near-future plans also include adopting Aviatrix Cloud Firewall for microsegmentation. “Aviatrix Cloud Firewall will allow more granular access to resources based on who needs access, which will greatly improve our security posture and help with compliance and governance,” said Radu.

“One of the best things about Aviatrix is how much easier it makes future planning,” said Marcel. “As we migrate away from legacy infrastructure, we don’t have to worry about redesigning our network because the right building blocks are in place. We can quickly spin up a new VPC with two spoke gateways and high-performance encryption. It saves us a lot of time and effort.”

In addition to the wide range of functionality that enables companies like HAPEV to future-proof their cloud strategies, Aviatrix also provides support to guide them through key transitions. “We’ve done quite a few migrations, and every time we needed help, Aviatrix was there,” said Radu. “The support we get is extremely valuable.”