Launching large-scale digital platforms for Intact.ca and IntactFC.com with CraftCMS

Over the past 5 years, our partnership with Intact Financial Corporation has involved modernizing several platforms of their digital ecosystem: a complete redesign of Intact.ca, an upgrade of their corporate site Intactfc.com towards the open-source Craft CMS and various digital projects, such as providing a highly secure alternative hosting solution (Amazon AWS) for Belairdirect.

A particular aspect of this collaboration is the involvement of multiple teams and approval levels within Intact, along with their commitment to playing a key role in the process of each project. Acting as an extension of their internal team, our role was to not only understand their challenges and address them with superior technological solutions, but also to train their teams, ensuring they could independently manage and evolve these solutions.

With a complex infrastructure, high traffic and firm performance and security needs, revamping Intact Financial Corporation’s main acquisition website required meticulous planning. The project involved close alignment with various stakeholders (legal team, security, IT) and an external auditor (Deloitte), along with sustained engagement from all involved teams.

The proposed technological solution includes a robust hosting infrastructure as well as a complete migration of the site to Craft CMS, providing Intact’s internal teams with an intuitive and efficient management application. A key aspect of the project was creating a custom module library that allowed for seamless website page design and structural changes, enhancing both the UX and technological experience.

The open-source Craft CMS solution offers a number of advantages: higher security levels, long-term application stability, increased customization capabilities, simplified maintenance, a user-friendly and well-structured management interface, more creative showcase sites and high-performing e-commerce platforms.

In order to optimize the corporate site dedicated to its investors, Intact was aiming to build a secure and high-performing architecture that met the high standards of its IT departments. With constantly evolving security requirements, it was essential to choose a technological solution that excelled in this area. Previously hosted on WordPress, the site was migrated to Craft CMS for its enhanced security, performance and component modularity.

A flexible, agile and adaptive project and development management approach was necessary to address the challenges faced by the involved departments at Intact. It was also crucial to have an intuitive CMS that is not only easy to use, but also allows quick management of access and content considering the content administration is handled by a variety of teams whose primary expertise isn’t web-based. Lastly, Leeroy’s role as a trainer, and the establishment of a learning hub to help Intact’s team master their platform, reinforced the trust and collaboration with the Group.

Seeking a hosting solution aligned with high standards of security, the implementation of Amazon AWS was indispensable for this client. Its user-friendly interface, enhanced security features and flexibility in migration applications, operating systems, programming languages, databases and desired services were part of the key advantages considered.

A modern technological infrastructure based on this solution, combined with essential security and performance criteria for user experience, was thus built as part of this hosting transfer.