Cloud computing for insurance firms: how do you know if you’re ready?
Although Cloud Computing has been a hot topic in the corporate IT sector for the past few years, with offerings available from large vendors such as Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and SAP, the introduction of consumer Cloud services, such as Dropbox, Gmail from Google and the recent launch of Apple’s much hyped iCloud offering, has raised broader attention. With this increased awareness will come demand for insurance CIO/CTO departments to consider Cloud Services. So how do you know if you are ready?
Cloud services offer a low cost, high quality, scalable service which provides companies with a fast path to deliver new offerings. It has quickly become a ‘real’ option to investigate when looking at how to deliver services to internal consumers and end customers.
While we all know that the benefit case for investing in cloud computing is clear, it should be tempered with the risk appetite of your organisation. For the insurance industry with regulatory and legislative needs (e.g. DPA, Solvency II), Cloud computing brings challenges for data management as well as introducing integration complexities.
So far, Cloud adoption has been fairly specialised and adoption has been led by start-ups and smaller enterprises. A recent study for AMD on global cloud computing adoption showed that organisations of fewer than 500 employees were ahead of larger ones when it came to hosting data and applications in the cloud . Another recent study by the Aberdeen Group showed that both small (38 percent) and midsize (48 percent) companies were well ahead of large enterprises (just 26 percent) when it came to the adoption of cloud storage solutions .
Key to success in a move to the Cloud, is to establish needs and objectives from the start, and then to invest the time and efforts to understand how to integrate these services to meet them.
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