Many IT experts say the cloud is essential for insurance companies on their digital journeys. However, in just a few years, the way the cloud is used and its capabilities have changed quite radically.
“When I was talking about cloud and cloud security about six or seven years ago, the conversations that I would have with people in the telecoms industry, the transport industry, or the mining industry were more around: Is the cloud secure?” said Melbourne based Ashish Rajan (pictured) who teaches a course in cloud security for the US-based SANS Institute and hosts his own podcast on cloud security issues.
“Now, that question doesn't exist,” he said. “The question last year was more around: How do I get more visibility around one of the clouds? This year, the conversation is more around: How do I get my visibility across multiple clouds?” said Rajan, who is also head of security and compliance with the talent management platform PageUp.
Rajan said the use of multiple clouds has made considerable headway in the last couple of years.
“I would go so far as to say that it would be really hard for you to find an enterprise that is only on one cloud in Australia,” he said.
For those sceptical about the insurance industry’s track record of adopting new technology, Rajan includes insurers as multi-cloud adopters.
“Based on the conversations that I've had, most of the companies in the insurance space are multi-cloud or they're thinking about being in multi-cloud,” he said. “I can tell you right now that all of them are at least 50% in the cloud already,” he added.
However, he said, some companies are still in a transition phase. This is not because they don’t want to engage with the cloud, he said, but perhaps because of financial challenges or because they’re not yet confident that there’s a clear transition to the cloud.
“They might have issues [around] all the resources they’ve put into data centres for such a long time and how to deal with [the transition]. Those companies are waiting for the right project before they can move into the cloud as well,” said Rajan.
Another possible reason, he suggested, is cloud security.
“It’s still very valid to ask that question today considering that in the last six months there have been three security weaknesses that were identified within cloud providers,” he said.
However, the main question for insurance companies right now, he said, is choosing the best cloud for the job. Rajan said, some years ago, Amazon could have been a natural first choice.
“Amazon [was first] to introduce the concept. It's similar to how Uber started and now we have the term, Uber. In the same way, Amazon was the first to start the cloud conversation, and from that, they got quite successful being the first to market,” he said.
However, as cloud technology has evolved, different cloud providers have become better at performing certain tasks.
“As time has progressed people have identified that the cloud can be used for a lot more than just releasing products fast,” said Rajan.
Today, companies, especially in the insurance space, are more focused on using the cloud to take advantage of the data they’ve accumulated.
“These are big data projects where you have petabytes of data about each individual that you have been insuring for all this while. So, you want to make your product better by taking information from each of those data points and basing insurance premiums on the pattern you’ve seen for the past 25 years with this individual and across similar profiles,” said Rajan.
He said Amazon is probably not the best choice for a data project of this kind.
“Now Amazon can process that kind of information, but it is not known to be a great player in the cloud space for big data. For a company with a big data project, Google Cloud is likely to be the best tool for the job that you're trying to do,” he said.
“Similarly, if you're after more of a platform service where you don't want to take care of the compute and you just want it built and plug in the backend of your insurance product, some people use Azure,” added Rajan.
