PETALING JAYA: Labuan Reinsurance (L) Ltd (Labuan Re) has completed a significant upgrade of its core infrastructure, reinforcing its commitment to resilience, continuity and long-term readiness in an increasingly complex global insurance environment.
Labuan Re chief information officer Patrick Wong said ensuring uninterrupted service despite unforeseen circumstances is central to maintaining trust across international markets, particularly for institutions that operate at the systemic level of financial risk management.
He said with more than three decades of business-to-business operations, Labuan Re has historically prioritised proven, stable platforms over frequent technological change.
“However, evolving industry demands and the need to support global growth prompted the company to reassess its infrastructure strategy. The recent relocation of Labuan Re’s data centre from Kuala Lumpur to Cyberjaya created a timely opportunity to modernise systems supporting its most critical workloads.
“Rather than pursuing incremental change, the company approached the transition as a strategic upgrade aligned with future operational and regulatory requirements.”
Wong noted that the infrastructure upgrade has delivered tangible improvements in reliability, workflow efficiency and scalability, strengthening Labuan Re’s ability to support complex reinsurance operations across borders.
By reassessing long-standing technology choices during the migration, the company demonstrated a willingness to adapt to remain competitive and future-ready while maintaining the high levels of stability expected of a reinsurance institution, he said.
“This milestone reflects a broader shift within the insurance and reinsurance industry, where leading institutions are balancing caution with innovation to ensure they remain robust in the face of evolving risks. For Labuan Re, the completed upgrade underscores its position as a forward-looking reinsurer – one that continues to invest in infrastructure capable of supporting its role in the global insurance ecosystem for years to come,” said Wong.
Labuan Re’s core infrastructure upgrade plans were guided by a combination of public benchmark tests, engagements with AMD’s Malaysia team, and insights drawn from local market adoption.
Wong said similar platforms had already been successfully implemented in the country, and that “most of the data centres in Malaysia were already using AMD for shared services”.
The company then undertook a structured evaluation based on its operational profile, in which about 80% of workloads were online and the remainder support batch processing.
This analysis reinforced the suitability of the upgrade for Labuan Re’s environment.
“Our main workload is a reinsurance transactional database and an intranet portal for claims underwriters. Most of our systems support back-office operations,” Wong explained.
To support the infrastructure upgrade, Labuan Re engaged several Tier 1 system integrators before appointing HPE as its implementation partner.
Following the appointment, the teams worked closely to identify the most effective system configuration aligned with the company’s operational priorities.
At the core of the initiative was a clear business objective: to address performance constraints within the existing environment and significantly shorten processing times for critical workloads.
The upgrade delivered results that exceeded expectations. Batch-processing times were reduced dramatically, enabling previously lengthy jobs to be completed in a fraction of the time.
Performance gains were also recorded across a broad range of core systems, including underwriting, reporting and financial analysis functions that underpin Labuan Re’s daily operations.
These improvements translated into faster insights, more responsive workflow and greater operational efficiency across the organisation.
“For Labuan Re, the successful migration represents more than a technical achievement. It demonstrates how a carefully executed infrastructure modernisation can directly enhance performance and scalability in a reinsurance environment where accuracy, speed, and reliability are essential.
“The upgrade positions the company to support its business partners better and adapt to the increasing data and processing demands shaping the global insurance and reinsurance industry,“ Wong said.
Labuan Re is now confident enough in its AMD migration that it is evangelising the technology to its peers.
“The financial services industry has a psychological barrier about moving to something that is not proven. They will do a test run first, and if within the next few years everything is okay, then they’ll slowly migrate,” Wong said.
However, he said, Labuan Re’s experience with the upgraded platform has reinforced its confidence in the robustness of the new infrastructure supporting its operations.
“As a reinsurance institution, the company operates under stringent service-level requirements and demands consistently high availability across its systems. Our SLA with our reseller is stringent, and our infrastructure must deliver high availability.”
Beyond the performance improvements, the upgrade has met Labuan Re’s expectations for reliability and operational resilience.
Wong said the platform has proven well-suited to support future growth and data-intensive workloads, positioning Labuan Re with an infrastructure that is aligned with the growing demands of the insurance and reinsurance industry.
