CLIENT OVERVIEW
Founded in 1875, Red River Mutual provides insurance coverage across Canada for businesses, farms, and homes. The insurer is committed to meeting Canadians’ needs as they evolve with competitive insurance products. Red River Mutual has been recognized as one of Insurance Business Canada’s Top Employers every year since 2019 and was named a Manitoba Top Employer in both 2025 and 2026.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Red River Mutual wanted to ensure that its technological foundation was able to keep up with the needs of its business strategy. From an application perspective, this meant being able to address growing security, compliance, and release speed expectations across its Guidewire core systems and other digital platforms with DevSecOps best practices.
Red River Mutual developed a strong proof of concept (POC) for the foundational frameworks it needed to modernize its application delivery model. These included embedding security earlier into the development life cycle, automating and standardizing CI/CD pipelines where possible, ensuring end-to-end visibility, and building a scalable DevSecOps foundation for future initiatives.
To bring the POC to life, the company wanted to partner with an organization that could review the POC, advise on additional best practices or improvements that could be added to the plan, and help get the plan into production quickly.
SOLUTION OFFERED
Red River Mutual wanted a partner with both DevSecOps experience and a keen understanding of insurance enterprise architecture, including Guidewire systems. The insurer also wanted a partner with the industry knowledge required to add insights where needed — not just provide additional resources to the project. As a Guidewire PartnerConnect Consulting partner at the Select level and proven DevSecOps experience, ValueMomentum stood out during the assessment phase.
The project productionized a DevSecOps pipeline for Red River Mutual’s Guidewire and Spring Boot-based applications. The solution standardized CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins on Microsoft Azure, integrated with Jira for traceability and governance, and aligned application delivery with enterprise security and compliance standards. ValueMomentum helped create an agent deployment pattern to maximize the efficiency of running DevOps pipelines in parallel.
The collaborative team implemented a shift-left approach to ensure that all code being written is analyzed for security vulnerabilities early on. These security controls integrate SAST, SCA, and secret scanning, with Guidewire Quality Gates embedded directly into the development and deployment workflows. The ValueMomentum team delivered comprehensive knowledge transfer and documentation to empower the Red River Mutual team to independently scale the DevSecOps foundation to drive the company’s future strategic initiatives.
"This effort was the result of a collaborative partnership.ValueMomentum analyzed what we had, understood where we wanted to go, and provided augmentations to our plan; they didn’t just add bodies to the implementation."
Brad Powell - Director of Enterprise Solutions
VALUE DELIVERED
Successfully putting the DevSecOps framework into production has not only enabled a scalable, secure foundation for Red River Mutual’s future development efforts, but it has also delivered an accelerated, more predictable release cycle with significantly reduced manual intervention and application security risk.
By automating parts of the development life cycle, Red River Mutual has given its team more time to focus on other tasks while remaining in the loop on deployments with the visibility provided through Jira. The reusable patterns have accelerated future application onboarding while the API-driven architecture supports easy expansion of integrations.
“While we had already begun prototyping our DevSecOps journey, we worked with ValueMomentum to benchmark what we had created against industry standards, enabling the collaborative team to bring a leading-edge DevSecOps foundation into production,” said Brad Powell, Director of Enterprise Solutions at Red River Mutual. “This effort was the result of a collaborative partnership. ValueMomentum analyzed what we had, understood where we wanted to go, and provided augmentations to our plan; they didn’t just add bodies to the implementation.”
Investing in a modern DevSecOps framework has helped Red River Mutual achieve more consistent value streams and catch issues and security risks much earlier in the process, giving the company more time to properly address any problems without impacting IT’s commitments to its business partners.
