Insurance SaaS Services on Cloud
Off late so much is being said in the media about SaaS, Cloud computing and its applicability to Insurance world, Recently a leading insurance industry focused technology journal highlighted 4 key technology solutions that will peak in 2010 and identified the top technology solution every CIO is evaluating at this point of time as Cloud computing and SaaS based software models. Quite a few big names have come to public about their intentions to seriously consider SaaS and Cloud as a part of their vision though they have also raised concerns on the ability of Cloud /SaaS to protect their data privacy requirements & organizational requirements in the longer term.
Cloud computing has two sides to it one covering the IT Infrastructure consisting of mainframes & end-user desktops and workplace computing. Insurance companies which have tried cloud have so far restricted themselves to private clouds. I believe insurance companies will continue to restrict themselves to safer cloud options in view of the data protection & privacy requirements.
On other side SaaS (Software as Service) has been adopted so far only around peripheral enterprise applications such as email, collaboration, office applications, and stand alone business applications such as CRM. Sales force lead management solutions have been existing for quite a number of years and salesforce.com is a classic example of how SaaS structure could be exploited by insurance companies. So far this is the area that has seen maximum SaaS adoption.
I believe that the both the key trends will grow to attract more attention and It is important for Life, P&C Insurers to adopt and build a longer term vision statement with a privacy protected Cloud , SaaS view.
Comments
Nicely captured both the solution which will take off in 2010 and thereafter. Till last time SaaS was only used as a jargon and now lot of CiOs are seriously looking this as alternative to support the business in a shorter period of time and more efficiently. India and Indian IT companies will play a major role in taking these two technologies to global level
Posted by: Sai | January 12, 2010 12:26 PM
Technology is vital to all the trends emerging in the insurance landscape, but more in the form of reusable business solutions as opposed to selling IT product.
One key technology emerging now and to be at the forefront of the industry for sometime moving forward is that of “Cloud Computing”.
Issues are the adoption of cloud computing / Saas as mainstream, the mentality/self protection of internal IT departments to change which benefits the insurance industry at large, regulator concerns on the SaaS business model & outsourcing conflicts and data privacy. I believe most of these issues can be addressed by education and understanding of change or even better reform.
For instance on Cloud computing security initiatives – keyless signatures and tampering prevention based technology can be used. One such technology is from guardtime (http://www.guardtime.com). They have been delivering unprecedented security for enterprises to safeguard Data – the most valuable asset in the cloud.
In a market like India with low insurance penetration and large rural areas the only real effective approach is to use technology as an enabler to embed services into a channel and then participate in making an insurance market around that channel. In developed markets one needs to look at core replacement to more flexible technologies which means not only to cloud computing based applications but a change in operating system & platform as well. For instance JOYENT (www.joyent.com) have developed a complete stack for an insurer to build a cloud.
Posted by: srinivasan mahadevan | February 25, 2011 7:28 AM