By Vivek Gujral, Executive Vice President & CTO, OneShield
(Oct. 15, 2013) – Faced with worrisome weather patterns, a sluggish economic recovery, lower investment returns and customer demands for 24/7 responsiveness, insurers are faced with high expectations in a high-pressure environment.
To meet these challenges, insurers may consider turning to cloud-based offerings, specifically private and hybrid cloud services, to rapidly deploy applications on pay-as-you-go infrastructure while ensuring business continuity. The private and hybrid cloud models provide customers with a private environment where their infrastructure is hosted and maintained by a technology provider allowing for maximum integration and configuration capabilities.
Benefits of implementation include:
- Lower total cost of ownership based on shared infrastructure model.
- Expert application services in the insurer’s own private environment.
- Rapid deployment of applications on traditional platforms using pre-made templates, increasing efficiency and consistency.
- Improved redundancy and scalability.
- Complete oversight and administration of the environment by engineers with highly focused core competencies.
- Flexible pricing model to best meet the insurer’s needs; pay for what they use, making it easier to determine future growth costs.
- Customer control over when upgrades are accepted in the production environment.
- Outsourced maintenance, development and configuration services.
- Point-in-time snapshots for rapid system and data recovery.
Speed to market is another advantage of using cloud-based systems, as deploying applications can be done in a matter of hours versus the weeks or months. Pre-made templates, including hardware configuration and software installations in virtual form, are used for rapid deployment of applications. These virtual, automated templates help improve consistency and efficiency, and eliminate the old hardware procurement model, which required the purchase of dedicated hardware and installation of an operating system.
Greater business agility has proven to be a necessary competitive differentiator and the cloud gives unprecedented flexibility in terms of reducing infrastructure demands and paying for what you need when you need it. This predictable cost model enables insurers to more effectively plan for and strategize future costs and investments for their business. Private cloud also allows for improved redundancy and scalability. Uptime and reliability are significantly higher and a private cloud offering provides backup and recovery as well as ability to run redundant systems. This becomes invaluable when circumstances beyond an insurer’s control arise.
Private cloud gives insurers the ability to quickly scale and provide the highest levels of service and responsiveness all while lowering total cost of ownership.
Reprinted with permission.
About OneShield
OneShield delivers flexible, enterprise-class policy management, billing, rating, product configuration and business intelligence/analytic solutions to the global P&C/General Insurance industry. Based on an open, tool-based architecture, OneShield Dragon® provides companies with the ability to streamline product creation, management, underwriting and distribution. With Dragon, P&C/General insurers gain a competitive advantage that helps them improve operations and profitability while meeting increasing customer and market demands. OneShield Dragon® is a proven industry solution in production across a combined 44 commercial, personal and specialty lines of business. OneShield develops innovative technology to better serve the needs of the industry and more importantly, their customers. OneShield is headquartered in Marlborough, MA and has an office in Gurgaon, India. Visit OneShield.com to learn more.
SOURCE: OneShield
