Cyber liability portal for a global insurance provider

Solution

Itransition developed a web-based cyber liability portal for the customer’s clients that we later extended to also cater to the new clients’ needs. For the portal, our team developed a neat UX/UI design and set up an AWS-based microservices infrastructure.

Content & learning management

Our team discussed with the customer how the new portal would fit into their current client nurturing processes and educational initiatives. We suggested utilizing a ready-made content management system as it would meet all the customer’s business needs and decrease the time and resources spent on developing the portal.

Having explored content management systems available on the market, Itransition suggested utilizing Strapi, a low-code headless CMS. It aligned perfectly with business and technical requirements and brought  the following benefits to the portal:

• Future-proof — with the headless CMS, the frontend is independent of the backend, meaning that our team could leverage the latest frontend frameworks
• Customizable — Strapi’s out-of-the-box functionality is highly customizable, ensuring the solution can be easily expanded
• Less computing power — the headless CMS generates the frontend as static pages, which decreases resource utilization in the cloud

To ensure the portal has great educational potential, Itransition integrated it with our customer’s internal system responsible for generating personalized cyber risk reports for each client. Even though the customer had a ready-made API for automatic file retrieval, our team adapted it to be used on the platform. We also enabled admins to manually upload risk reports to user profiles in case additional reports become available.

Admins can also link the identified issues from the report with the content pieces on the portal to direct users to the most relevant articles and training courses and help them fill in their knowledge gaps. Thus, we made the portal a one-stop shop for users’ cyber security needs.

As for learning management, our team enabled the portal’s integration with Wizer, a cyber liability learning platform with training courses, phishing simulations, and gamified exercises. Since our customer and their clients were already familiar with Wizer through their learning projects, we decided it would be best to integrate the portal with it rather than build a new LMS.

UX/UI design

In this project, the UX/UI design part played a crucial step in the portal’s success, as it was important to ensure users would find the platform enjoyable and user-friendly. To create the portal’s design, we used Ant Design, a React-based library and UI framework with ready-made components and elements to accelerate the portal’s front-end development. Itransition developed the design in line with our customer’s brand book, preserving the look and feel that the customer has across their other IT solutions. Apart from the style guidelines, the customer granted a high degree of freedom to our UX/UI designers, trusting their expertise and experience in creating online portals.

Making the portal public

The customer initially aimed to create the portal for existing clients only. But, impressed with the intermediary results delivered by our team, they decided to use the portal to attract new clients.

Having discussed the customer’s ideas and objectives, our team suggested introducing a more nuanced system of accessing the portal’s content to increase its marketing potential.

Initially, all the articles were made available to the user once they logged into the portal by following the invitation link sent to their corporate emails by the portal’s admins. But with the portal becoming public, our customer wanted to restrict certain content only to their existing end clients. Thus, Itransition developed visibility parameters (private, public, public unlisted options) and enabled them for the articles.

However, since the portal’s frontend is made up of static pages that are pre-generated, the web application cannot check via an API if a user has suitable permission to access an article or if the visibility parameter has changed. Thus, we suggested introducing incremental builds into the customer's infrastructure to create a more tailored content access system.

With the incremental builds, the portal’s backend registers when admins change the article and checks if it should launch a new incremental build with the applied changes. If yes, then the system generates new updated pages with static content and deploys them to the cloud, granting users public access to the previously private article.

Process

The team included a project manager, a tech lead, a business analyst, and UX/UI design, software engineering, DevOps, and QA professionals. We leveraged Scrum as the project management methodology, delivering the solution in increments and conducting necessary ceremonies. Our team worked in two-week sprints, demoing the results to stakeholders.

We suggested utilizing a Time & materials pricing model with a budget cap and a fixed deadline. The model provided the customer with great visibility into the project’s budget and end date, while also providing our team with enough agility to develop the project most efficiently.

To ensure transparency, Itransition prepared detailed project progress reports, allowing the customer to assess project progress at any level of granularity, from overall resources available/spent to individual velocity charts.

At the project’s start, we defined its scope and, before each sprint, prioritized backlog items in close collaboration with our customer’s director of product management — the main stakeholder who performed a product owner’s role. With them, we set project priorities, clarified the requirements, and discussed feature ideas. Additionally, our team synced up on the technical aspects with IT stakeholders to ensure the portal would seamlessly fit into the customer’s existing systems.