Sun Life Taps AWS as Its Long-Term Strategic Cloud Provider to Transform Digital Services

One of the world’s most trusted insurance companies uses AWS technology to innovate for clients, develop employees, and become a more agile business in the cloud

Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Sun Life (TSX: SLF) (NYSE: SLF) has selected AWS as its long-term strategic cloud technology provider to become a cloud-first organization, drive ongoing innovation, and develop new digital client experiences. Sun Life will use AWS’s proven portfolio of cloud technologies, including analytics, machine learning, storage, security, and databases, to drive operational efficiency and innovation to the company’s clients and employees.

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Through its relationship with AWS, Sun Life became the first company in Canada to launch an immersive cloud skills training program, which is now available to Sun Life employees. Dubbed “Catalysts for Cloud” and using the AWS Skills Guild, a comprehensive skills enablement program to build cloud fluency, the initiative focuses on attracting and developing top talent. The program brings together Sun Life’s cloud experts alongside AWS instructors to offer peer-to-peer learning and hands-on training to build cloud skills across the organization. Over the next few months, Sun Life will certify the first 450 business and technical employees with this AWS program and will continue to train more employees to help expedite cloud adoption and develop new client-facing and internal capabilities.

As part of its move to accelerate digital transformation and deliver new client experiences using the cloud, Sun Life built development workspaces in North America and innovation labs in Asia to bring together IT teams and business leaders to innovate with AWS technologies. In Asia, for example, one of the labs created the Sun Life Secure Experience, which enables Sun Life advisors to collaborate with clients virtually using video conferencing and secure file sharing. The new offering uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Route 53 (AWS’s cloud Domain Name System web service) to provide a reliable and cost-effective way for clients and advisors to connect remotely to view and discuss financial documents. The Sun Life Secure Experience also uses Amazon SageMaker, which is AWS’s service that enables data scientists and developers to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly in the cloud and at the edge.

“Our aim in moving to the cloud is to be a digital innovator for our clients and use technology to shape how we work and develop employees at Sun Life. AWS’s portfolio of cloud technologies help us to be predictive, proactive, and personal by taking client insights and translating them into new, digital ways to meet their needs,” said Laura Money, Chief Information Officer and Executive Vice President, Sun Life. “I dream of the day when we get client insights in the morning and deliver a solution by the evening. I’m excited to know we can realize this dream with our teams working differently using AWS.”

“Sun Life has a long history of embracing digital technology to offer new services and features that keep customers at the center of everything they do. By running on the world’s leading cloud, Sun Life has the agility to quickly build and scale new platforms to give customers more ways to manage their portfolios as the demand for digital services continues to grow,” said Frank Fallon, Vice President of Financial Services, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “Sun Life’s cloud-first approach signals a commitment to modernizing its infrastructure that sets the standard for other insurers in Canada. Companies throughout the financial services industry can count on AWS’s scale, performance, and breadth of capabilities to drive innovation and continuously deliver for their customers.”

About Amazon Web Services

For over 15 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud offering. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any cloud workload, and it now has more than 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 81 Availability Zones (AZs) within 25 geographic regions, with announced plans for 21 more Availability Zones and seven more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Spain, and Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth’s Best Employer, and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About Sun Life

Sun Life is a leading international financial services organization providing insurance, wealth and asset management solutions to individual and corporate Clients. Sun Life has operations in a number of markets worldwide, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, India, China, Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia and Bermuda. As of June 30, 2021, Sun Life had total assets under management of $1.36 trillion. For more information please visit www.sunlife.com.

Sun Life Financial Inc. trades on the Toronto (TSX), New York (NYSE) and Philippine (PSE) stock exchanges under the ticker symbol SLF.

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