Insurance

Cloud computing is the next big technology in IT. For once, IT can look at real, cost-effective options to respond to business with real-time agility. With the current economic events, most Insurance CIOs are working with their business partners to optimize IT spend. Cloud computing brings with it a promise of IT simplification and TCO reduction. Vendor offerings in this space are growing by the day, but the challenges of adopting cloud are yet to be fully addressed and many are unknown. Deciding on an appropriate path for onboarding their applications portfolio to the cloud poses a big challenge for insurance CIOs. We take a close look at the insurance value chain and the enabling applications to provide a broad guiding framework for moving these applications onto the cloud in an incremental fashion guided by the maturity of the cloud services. It takes a quick 'dip-stick' view of how the ecosystem influencing cloud computing is likely to be impacted and evolve. In this context, the paper also looks at an analytics-led infrastructure transformation approach that can help insurers achieve this transition reliably .

Marketing, Sales and Distribution

• Data utilized for day-to-day operations and for campaign management can be moved to cloud computing in Wave 1.
• Most software utilized in marketing will move to SaaS in Wave 2.
• Sales and Distribution Systems, especially those used by captive and independent agents, are likely to be Wave 2 or Wave 3 migrations to cloud. This is primarily because these systems are not robust, are constantly changing, and tend to be created in-house, since they are viewed as differentiators. The vendors of agency systems will begin their migration to SaaS but will do so very slowly.