Case Study: Enterprise, Self-Hosted n8n for a Global Insurer

Production-grade, owned, compliant automation that survives a real enterprise security review, not a demo that dies at the firewall.

The client

A global insurance and financial-services organization, the kind of regulated, enterprise-scale environment where “just use a cloud automation tool” is a non-starter.

The challenge

Business teams needed the productivity of low-code workflow automation, but the environment ruled out every public SaaS option.

• Strict regulatory controls (GDPR and DORA), data-residency requirements, mandatory SSO, and full audit logging.
• A locked-down runtime: an egress proxy that blocks most public APIs, a web application firewall in front of every app, and corporate identity enforced everywhere.
• Everything had to run self-hosted, inside the company’s own security perimeter, and integrate with existing enterprise systems.

The approach

We designed, hardened, and deployed an enterprise-grade self-hosted automation platform, then built the automations on top of it.

• Self-hosted n8n in scalable queue mode, containerized, with a production Kubernetes / Helm deployment and a custom hardened image.
• A full supporting stack: reverse proxy with TLS and rate limiting, edge SSO against the corporate identity provider, PostgreSQL, Redis, and log shipping into the enterprise SIEM.
• Security as a first-class deliverable: SSO on every route, least-privilege database roles, hardened read-only containers with dropped capabilities and internal-only networking, disciplined secrets handling, and disabled external telemetry.
• Compliance controls mapped to GDPR/DORA: encrypted off-site backups, data-retention pruning, an audit-log trail, disaster-recovery restore drills, and SIEM forwarding.
• Enterprise integrations: corporate SSO, enterprise Git with the company’s mandatory MFA deployment flow, Microsoft 365 / Graph, the organization’s approved enterprise LLM, and its issue-tracking system.
• Then the automations themselves: a multi-pass AI content engine, an AI ticket-triage copilot, a renewal-monitoring workflow, and AI-assisted error monitoring, all engineered to run within the network’s tight egress and security constraints.

The result

A production, SSO-gated, audit-logged, encrypted-backup automation platform running entirely inside a heavily restricted enterprise network, with GDPR/DORA controls and multiple production automations shipped on top. Where standard cloud tools were prohibited, the client now owns a secure automation capability integrated across the core of their enterprise stack.

Why it matters

Most automation vendors stop at “connect these SaaS apps.” Regulated enterprises can’t work that way. This is the harder, rarer capability: production-grade, owned, compliant automation that survives a real security review.