Migrating FWD to GitHub Enterprise Managed Users with zero downtime

Furō’s advisory service equipped FWD Group Hong Kong with the confidence to perform the migration with ease and minimal impact.

​The Customer

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FWD Group Hong Kong is a leading insurer offering life and medical insurance, general insurance, employee benefits, and financial planning services. They are rapidly advancing its digital capabilities - to accelerate developer productivity, the company rolled out GitHub Copilot across its engineering teams, driving AI-assisted development at scale. 

​The Challenge

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With GitHub Copilot rolled out to a growing engineering team of 125+ developers, managing access and user identity at scale quickly became complex. Manual user lifecycle management created inefficiencies, fragmented audit visibility, and slowed compliance.

As usage expanded, the team began to encounter operational friction around access control and identity management. The process for provisioning and de-provisioning developers was manual, time-consuming, and lacked integration with FWD Group Hong Kong’s internal identity systems, leading to overhead, inconsistencies, and compliance risks.

While GitHub Enterprise Cloud continued to support day-to-day collaboration effectively, its identity model based on personal GitHub.com accounts made it difficult to align with enterprise security and governance requirements.

Several core challenges surfaced:

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• Manual onboarding/offboarding introduced risk and overhead. 

• Limited integration with corporate identity systems complicated policy enforcement.

• Group-based access controls were not easily mapped to internal structures

• Audit visibility and reporting were fragmented without centralised identity ownership

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These limitations created friction for both developers and security teams, prompting FWD Group to explore a more scalable and enterprise-aligned approach to identity and access management for GitHub.

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Furō's Approach​​

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Furō partnered with FWD Group to enable GitHub Enterprise Managed Users (EMU), ensuring the rollout was strategic, secure and disruption-free.

Key steps included:

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• Advising on identity mapping approaches, access control, and naming conventions.

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• Identifying risks with existing Okta and SailPoint integrations, and recommending Microsoft Entra ID for simplicity and cost savings, given it was already part of FWD's infrastructure.

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• Aligning access controls with FWD Group Hong Kong’s enterprise governance needs.

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• Coordinating Copilot licence migration to avoid overlaps across systems and minimise user impact .

​By leveraging infrastructure already in place, Furō enabled a low-risk, cost-efficient path to GitHub EMU adoption - ensuring developers stayed productive while the platform matured.​

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Furō's Impact​​​​​​

The transition to GitHub Enterprise Managed Users transformed identity and access management for FWD Group.

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• Zero disruption:  125+ developers migrated with no downtime nor disruption to productivity.

• Efficiency:  Automated processes saved ~24 days annually in manual effort. 

• Speed:  85% faster to onboard new developers.

• Cost savings:  Avoided ~$75k USD in additional licenceing across 7000+ employees and ~$5k USD in Copilot licence overlaps. 

• Governance:  Centralised identity has strengthened audit, compliance and overall security posture.

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Furō enabled FWD Group to deliver a secure, compliant, and scalable developer experience with GitHub Copilot - turning what was once a complex operational challenge into a streamlined, cost-effective foundation for innovation.