It has become fashionable in some insurance circles to relegate Cloud Computing to a technology in search of a solution. This might be premature dismissal of an approach which could offer significant business benefits.
In a recent blog post, Celent’s Ben Moreland says that people who focus solely on the technology miss the point. While the technology is important, the real benefits offered by Cloud computing are longer term agility ot address business problems. These are only put into clear focus when organizations “look at their architecture, organization, governance, strategy and process maturity” in making decisions on what applications to put on the cloud and how it supports business needs. Moreland concludes: “Cloud, technically speaking, may simply leverage the Internet and virtualization, old technologies, but do not be fooled into thinking that is all it is.”
Ellen Carney, a senior analyst with Forrester, quoted recently in Insurance & Technology, makes the point that large insurers can gain significant flexibility by using clouds, effectively linked to legacy systems, in expanding into foreign markets: “They’ve got to establish beachheads in new markets fast — meaning the legacy ‘we’ll build it ourselves’ approach simply isn’t going to work,” she explains. “Enter rapidly deployable SaaS options that provide multi-language and multi-currency capabilities pretty much out of the box that stay standalone or run the new business while IT integrates this new business into their legacy systems.”
Donald Light, Senior Analyst at Celent, will be presenting on the topic “Clearing the Air: SaaS and Clouds” at the 2011 Insurance-Canada.ca Technology Conference, February 28, 2011 in Toronto.
I think Cloud Computing can also be leveraged to implement “greener” practices in the car insurance industry. Imagine a world where, at least here in BC, where we didn’t have to keep a physical copy of the vehicle registration and proof of insurance in their car, but rather be able to present a copy on their iPhone or any of the hundreds of other smart phones in the market today. This would reduce the use of many tonnes of paper each year. We can show our boarding passes on our phones now and use that as proof to board a plane so why can’t we apply that practice to license and registration?
Now a days Cloud computing is important for a business to improve networking. It plays critical role in helping insurers connect with their customer base. Thus, it helps in improving business benefits. With Implementing cloud computing,there is no need to maintain tonnes of paper to keep record of data. It is a critical element of competitive success for the insurance industry going forward. pretaxhealth..
Cloud computing is critical and plays a central role in the oncoming social and mobile revolution. Thanks for the article.