HDI Sigorta Scales for Secure Growth with F5 ADSP

HDI Sigorta insures customers in Turkey through innovative digital services that meet strict data sovereignty requirements. With hundreds of APIs providing app connectivity across its hybrid infrastructure and some 200 partner relationships, the company uses F5 ADSP to ensure performance, reliability, and security for customers while improving visibility and operational efficiency.

Business Challenge

HDI Sigorta delivers a full portfolio of property, liability, business, transport, health, and other insurance solutions to individual and corporate customers in Turkey. More than 800 employees serve customers from 15 regional offices and through hundreds of agencies nationwide, with significant integration with government institutions to comply with local regulations. First established in 1996, the company began operating as HDI Sigorta in 2006 and today is among the country’s top 10 insurance firms. As a part of the global Talanx Group, it draws on the reliability and governance of an international insurance ecosystem.

In the highly regulated Turkish market, HDI focuses on customer-centric digital services, making ongoing investments in digital transformation to speed innovation and ensure operational resilience and continuity. Scale matters, as HDI manages 500,000 insurance policy transactions daily—50 times that of many competitors. In addition, its agile software teams release new features and upgrades as often as twice a week, making automation crucial. The company’s hybrid architecture combines two on-premises data centers (DC) with disaster recovery center (DRC) operations in an active/warm, DC/DRC topology. It also selectively adopts private cloud deployments for some use cases, such as its call center, that can meet stringent data residency and other compliance needs.

Since 2019, HDI has relied on F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), BIG-IP DNS, and BIG-IP Advanced WAF to help deliver and secure its applications. These solutions provide consistent performance under traffic volumes that can exceed 100 million daily requests across more than 200 active APIs.

“APIs have become the backbone of HDI’s digital ecosystem,” says Kazim Cesur, Architecture and Infrastructure Director for HDI Sigorta. “As the number of services and integrations has grown, APIs have evolved into a business-critical layer driving speed, scalability, and connectivity.”

As part of a long-term transition from monolithic systems to a modular, service-oriented architecture, HDI in 2025 decided to take the next step on its modernization roadmap while strengthening security for distributed apps and APIs.

“Operating at this scale has introduced new priorities,” says Cesur. “End-to-end visibility across APIs and the ability to identify unmanaged or shadow APIs have become essential for us to maintain control and reduce risk.”

Solutions

After considering its options, HDI Sigorta implemented F5 Distributed Cloud Services to support its cloud deployments and extend its F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP). Factors in the decision included the stability, reliability, and high performance of F5 products and support, plus their alignment with both current HDI needs and its plans for the future.

“We evaluated other vendors with solutions that were hard to use or had different capabilities,” says Cesur. “But we’d already used F5 solutions and knew their scalability and robustness, and the team already knew how to manage F5 devices and software. The new features of Distributed Cloud Services were useful and easy to use. So, we stayed with F5.”

The phased implementation of SaaS-based Distributed Cloud Services began with Distributed Cloud DNS to enhance app availability and business resilience. “Given the critical nature of our digital insurance services and the volume of transactions we process, we wanted to eliminate DNS as a potential single point of failure,” says Cesur.Implementing secondary DNS capability was a strategic decision to improve operational resilience as the environment grew.

Distributed Cloud API Security followed to help improve discoverability and improve the company’s control over its increasingly distributed API landscape. This approach allows HDI to incrementally extend its architecture with additional F5 ADSP capabilities over time, gaining the benefits of distributed services while preserving control, compliance, and operational consistency.

Results

Enhance app availability, security, and reliability

With F5 ADSP in place, HDI has built an architecture designed for near-zero downtime that can better ensure uninterrupted digital services for customers. Enhanced inspection and threat protection at scale, plus more predictable and resilient traffic management, together reduce the risk of service disruption, either from operational incidents or potential attacks, even when traffic peaks.

“We have increased our capacity three times compared with last year,” says Cesur. “Our latest F5 investment has enabled secure growth without performance trade-offs.”

Although extensive integration with governmental systems can impact uptime in ways outside of HDI’s control, the company typically delivers its services with high availability at or over 99%.

Improve API visibility and control

Deploying Distributed Cloud Services has helped HDI increase the observability of its traffic. Distributed Cloud API Security specifically increased API discovery, security, and governance capabilities, complementing HDI’s open-source API gateway while helping the company to clearly distinguish between application and API traffic and security.

“F5 helped us significantly reduce blind spots across the API landscape, improved our threat detection capabilities, and enabled us to respond faster and more confidently to emerging risks,” says Altuğ Şahin, Network and Cybersecurity Manager for HDI Sigorta. “Ensuring that all exposed services are actively managed and secure strengthens the company’s compliance posture and sets us up to sustain secure digital growth.”

The HDI team is also using F5 iRules to gain more advanced control over traffic, including API and DNS configurations.

Meet data sovereignty needs

F5 ADSP empowers HDI Sigorta to adopt an agile hybrid architecture while still complying with governmental regulations. For applications and services that are not subject to data sovereignty requirements, Distributed Cloud solutions deliver SaaS-based web application firewall (WAF) protection, API visibility and security, and DNS services. For sensitive data and workloads that must remain local and on-premises, BIG-IP solutions provide the same protection, services, and load balancing through familiar F5 dashboards.

This hybrid deployment model allows HDI to meet mandates while applying consistent app delivery and security services wherever the company’s applications reside without compromising functionality, security, or operational efficiency.

Increase operational efficiency

By deploying a fully integrated app delivery and security layer, HDI centralized control and simplified management. F5 ADSP operates seamlessly across the company’s on-premises and distributed environments, increasing operational flexibility and service consistency while supporting evolutionary rather than disruptive transformation when changes are needed or new digital services are deployed.

“Implementation time for F5 is in days, and when we scale, we can add a cluster in minutes,” notes Cesur. “It just works. Other brands would take more time compared to F5 because we’d have to redefine and reconfigure everything. For the very critical processes in our core insurance system, if we are losing time, we are losing money.”

Support future scale and strategies

The deployment has enabled HDI to readily scale its operations through significant digital transformation and infrastructure renewal without service disruption or architectural complexity. Hakan Şatır, Chief Information Officer for HDI Sigorta, says, “F5 solutions have enabled HDI Sigorta to establish a high-performance, resilient, and future-ready application delivery platform capable of supporting both today’s scale and tomorrow’s growth.”

As it looks to the future, the company is moving toward an active/active architecture and expanding its use of AI. Cesur says, “F5 has effectively become a foundational layer in HDI’s architecture, supporting critical services with consistency, performance, and control. F5 solutions are reliable, scalable, and secure.”