How Premera Blue Cross strengthened the heartbeat of its business with Microsoft Azure

The heartbeat of the business

When a member visits a clinician or a provider submits a claim, they rarely think about the technology working behind the scenes to make the experience seamless. But for health plans like Premera, that technology is mission critical.

At the center of it all is Facets, Premera’s core payer administration platform. It supports member enrollment, claims processing, billing, and provider payments, and more; functions so essential that leaders across the organization describe it as “the heartbeat” of the business.

“If Facets goes down, everything stops,” explains Nara Jaganathan, Vice President of Software and Service Engineering. “Every road at Premera leads to claims.”

As the company continued to grow, Premera recognized that modernizing this foundational platform wasn’t simply an IT initiative. It was a business imperative that would strengthen resilience while giving the organization the flexibility to innovate and better serve members and providers.

Building for resilience and growth

For years, Premera had embraced a cloud-first strategy, but migrating Facets represented an entirely different level of complexity.

“This was our mothership,” says Senior Engineering Manager Sudhakar Lankalapalli. “As long as it remained on-premises, every other modernization effort was harder because everything ultimately connected back to it.”

The existing environment also presented practical challenges. Scaling infrastructure to meet changing business demands required significant planning and investment. Disaster recovery capabilities needed to evolve. Engineering teams spent valuable time maintaining infrastructure and completing upgrades rather than focusing on new capabilities.

For Director of Software Engineering Sunny Burns, modernization was also about preparing the organization for the future. “As our workforce grows and our customers grow, we need technology that can scale with us,” she explains. “We also wanted to build an environment that attracts engineering talent and enables modern DevSecOps practices so our teams can deliver value faster.”

Raising the stakes

The importance of Facets also made the migration inherently risky. Premera simply couldn’t tolerate extended downtime or performance regressions. A failed migration could interrupt claims processing, affecting provider payments and the timely delivery of care for members.

“The biggest concern was bringing the business to a standstill,” recalls Jaganathan. “We wanted to make absolutely sure we could execute this transition without negatively impacting our customers.”

Leadership also knew they weren’t entering uncharted territory alone. Other organizations had attempted similar transformations with mixed results.

“There weren’t many examples we could point to and say, ‘Let’s just do what they did,’” says Wayne Heller, Chief of Staff to the COO. “We knew the stakes were high, and that made careful planning and execution even more important.”

Rather than rushing the migration, the team built Azure environments in parallel and systematically validated preproduction systems before production cutover.

A partnership focused on outcomes

Microsoft’s partnership helped Premera validate its migration approach and move forward with confidence, supporting a successful transition of a mission-critical platform to Azure with zero data loss and no rollback required.

For Darcy Schroeder, Vice President of Customer Implementation Core Operations, what stood out wasn’t simply the technology. It was the nature of the collaboration. “There’s a big difference between having a partner who takes your call and having a partner who’s already on the call trying to solve the problem,” she says. “Microsoft showed up alongside our teams and worked through challenges with us.”

That collaborative approach helped Premera move forward with confidence.

“We wanted access to expertise around architecture, implementation, and scaling,” says Jaganathan. “Microsoft’s willingness to engage deeply and validate our approach gave us confidence that we were making the right decisions.”

The partnership also extended beyond migration planning. By working together on infrastructure design, reserved capacity planning, and operational strategy, the teams created a platform intended not just to support today’s workloads, but tomorrow’s ambitions as well.

Delivering measurable impact

The migration itself represented transformation at true enterprise scale. During production cutover, approximately 54 terabytes of data were migrated while modernizing more than 220 servers, enabling over 2,400 users, and transitioning roughly 1,400 batch processes. Most importantly, the migration was completed with zero data loss and no rollback required.

Within the first 60 days, the business began realizing tangible operational improvements:

• Batch processing times improved by approximately 38%
• User response times improved by roughly 5%
• Disaster recovery capabilities advanced toward near real-time recovery objectives
• Increased automation reduced manual operational effort and simplified maintenance
• Enhanced scalability and reliability strengthened the platform for future growth

While those improvements were meaningful from an infrastructure perspective, they also had a direct impact on the people responsible for processing claims every day. Faster batch processing reduced competition for system resources during the workday, creating a smoother experience for claims teams while laying the groundwork for future modernization.

“The more we reduce the time batch processing runs, the better the system performs for our end users,” says Matt Pumper, Vice President of Claims Operations and Federal Employee Program. “Batch can finish without impacting our claims processors as they do their work.”

The improvements also extended beyond claims operations. Engineering teams now spend less time maintaining infrastructure and more time delivering new capabilities that improve the experience for members, providers, and employees.

Equally valuable were the downstream effects on engineering productivity. “It’s not just about doing upgrades faster,” says Schroeder. “It’s about spending less time maintaining the platform and more time taking advantage of new functionality that helps us better serve our customers.”

By reducing operational complexity, engineering teams can devote more attention to delivering new capabilities rather than simply keeping infrastructure current.

A foundation for the future

For Premera, moving Facets to Azure was never the finish line. Instead, it established a stronger operational foundation for continued modernization across the enterprise. The organization is now positioned to build on that success, using its cloud foundation to modernize additional systems and support the next generation of capabilities.

The migration has also changed the way leaders think about what’s possible. “It just continues to prove to us that we can do the big things. We can do the hard things,” says Todd Manning, Vice President for Customer Service and Platform Engineering. “It builds confidence that we’re able to take advantage of the technology in Azure to host these critical applications for Premera and for our members.”

Ultimately, the migration represents more than a successful technology project. It established a stronger foundation for Premera’s ongoing transformation, from improving claims operations today to enabling future initiatives such as real-time claims processing, AI, and automation. By modernizing its most mission-critical platform, Premera positioned itself to continue innovating without compromising the service members and providers depend on every day.

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