Insurance Industry Perspective on Oracle Cloud

By Jason Sahota, Group CIO, Charles Taylor plc

Jason Sahota, Group CIO, Charles Taylor plc

Why Cloud

Disruption as a result of advances in technology is taking place at an unprecedented speed and Cloud computing is one of the most powerful forces driving this.

Insurance Industry players are realizing that moving core applications and their data in to the cloud must be integral part of any digital transformation program. The impact of cloud adoption that matters most for Insurance is “Business Agility”.

The sluggishness that was once ingrained in long-term plans such as deploying new systems, offering new lines of business, and expanding to new markets is no longer acceptable. The cloud eliminates the need for companies to configure new hardware, manage updates, run data centres, and much more – enabling them to focus more time on leveraging technology to realise business benefits.

INSIS on Oracle Cloud

In 2017, Charles Taylor InsureTech chose Oracle Cloud for its core insurance platform solution “INSIS” a policy administration and claims management system that provides full coverage for all lines of insurance businesses, life, general, and health insurance businesses.

Oracle Cloud made a natural fit for the cloud platform as INSIS is built using Oracle software, but also Oracle’s roadmap fits Charles Taylor’s plans for adding further IPand because Oracle has a reputation for dealing with the type of high volume complex mathematical computational calculations that are typical in insurance. Extending it into the cloud platform as a service was a natural step away from the old traditional on-premise model for that particular solution.

Oracle Cloud Services Utilized

The following are the main oracle cloud services utilized by Charles Taylor InsureTech:
1. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
2. Oracle Java Cloud Service
3. Oracle Database Cloud Service
4. Oracle Integration Cloud Service

Why Oracle Cloud

Extending INSIS into the oracle cloud platform and selling it as a service was the natural progression for policy administration and claims management solution. We are increasingly seeing clients look for agility, scalability, and resilience in their core business operations systems – the cloud is the most effective way to realise these needs as well as offering client’s commercial models that flex in line with their business use too.

I have other solutions where I've selected other providers but for other reasons. My view is always I will pick the right technology depending on the use case and the product within the portfolio. I'm also a firm believer that one size doesn’t fit all, and you've got to build the technology to really build with the business outcome you're trying to solve.

For Charles Taylor InsureTech, the seamless transition from on-prem Oracle database to Oracle database cloud service, as well as seamless lift and shift of JAVA application from on-premise Weblogic application server to Oracle Java Cloud Service was a key advantage with Oracle Cloud.

With sophisticated security and high performance, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers a safer place for companies to run their business

This seamless lift and shift use case is very attractive proposition for any company which is considering moving their current Oracle Applications to the cloud.

Cyber Security & Oracle Cloud

Many studies have often found security to be the leading concern, scepticism or fear that stands in the way of cloud adoption.

In recent times, relentless and continuous surge of cyber-attacks has triggered a more vigilant IT atmosphere within Enterprises.

In the context of On-Premise, security breaches often happen because the systems are not being properly maintained or patched well enough. In-house cybersecurity teams are tasked with identifying anomalies and responding to potential threats, they face additional limitations with traditional on-premises solutions, inadequate storage, processing power and scalability.

Furthermore, the need for regular capital investment in on-premise infrastructure can also lead to behaviours of “sweating assets” or delaying investments which can create greater exposure to cyber risks. One of the benefits of cloud is that it is operational expenditure and is “ever green” and up to date.

Oracle Cloud is built around multiple layers of security and multiple levels of defence throughout the technology stack. If vulnerability is discovered and exploited in one layer, the unauthorized user will be confronted with another security control in the next layer.

Oracle provides options for encryption, redaction, and data masking capabilities for data protection. Oracle provides privileged user controls on various administrators.

Oracle cloud’s autonomous offerings promises self-tuning, self-healing with automated maintenance and updates and very little downtime.

Benefits of Oracle Cloud

The key benefits we realized by moving our insurance solution on Oracle Cloud are
1. Fast Time to Market
2. Full SaaS cloud-based Insurance solution
3. Secured and Compliance Assured
4. Scalable and usage based, growing with the insurer’s business
5. Integrated and high performant system
6. Ease of moving workload (Lift & Shift)
7. Lower total cost of ownership
8. Low experiment cost

Plans with Oracle Cloud

At Charles Taylor InsureTech, we continue to explore how Oracle Cloud technologies can be integrated into our future world class insurance solution offerings. Areas that we are either starting work on in 2019 or already have proof of concepts underway include:

1. Oracle Digital Assistant (Chatbot)
2. Oracle Autonomous Datawarehouse
3. Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing
4. Oracle API Platform Cloud Service
5. Oracle Analytics Cloud Service
6. Oracle IoT Cloud Service
7. Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service

Conclusion

Oracle has traditionally been at the fore-front of offering secure and high-performance enterprise systems and software. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (Oracle’s Gen-2 Cloud) follows the same principle. With sophisticated security and high performance, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers a safer place for companies to run their business.

Their roadmap of utilising Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in their autonomous offerings and digital assistant platform is impressive and Oracle Cloud offers the widest range of cloud services within IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

All these qualities make Oracle Cloud an attractive cloud platform for insurance companies to move their complex, high volume work-loads on Oracle Cloud and offer high quality of service to their users.

Our partnership with Oracle allows us to take advantage of Oracle Cloud’s prowess and enables us to build market leading insurance business solutions for our clients.