There was a time, not so long ago, when businesses were nervous about depending on the cloud. Today, that has all changed (source Forbes), and most technology vendors are positioning themselves as being in the cloud.
So, what’s changed?
Some would argue that the Covid pandemic was the driver. And whilst it’s true that the need to work remotely accelerated the adoption of cloud-based technologies, big tech providers like Salesforce (150% 2016-2020 growth) had already made great in-roads into forward-thinking businesses.
Further, most organisations across all sectors now expect to significantly ramp up adoption and migrate a growing share of their IT environment to public cloud, with a projected 32% annual growth in cloud services by 2025 (source McKinsey).
What does ‘born-in-the-cloud’ actually mean?
True born-in-the-cloud solutions come with powerful benefits over the retrofitted legacy approach. This blog aims to explore how these can help our sector, from insurers to agencies, brokers, and MGAs, to improve operations, reduce costs, and increase revenues.
At its simplest, born-in-the-cloud (or cloud-native) solutions are those that have been entirely designed, built, deployed, and managed within a cloud computing environment. Novidea is an example of this approach since it was built on the Salesforce SaaS platform.
Many insurance technology vendors claim to offer cloud solutions, but when you examine them more closely, solutions that are labelled as ‘cloud-based’ are often little more than legacy off-premise offerings that have been retrofitted to be available remotely.
You can learn whether your current vendor is really cloud native here
This happens when legacy software providers skip the time-consuming and expensive rebuilding of their applications for the cloud and instead create web-based, front-end interfaces that are still attached to legacy application architectures in the back end.
True cloud-native software delivers a lower total cost of ownership, zero maintenance for you as the customer, automated product updates, elastic computing power that increases and decreases according to a business’ needs, and seamless integration with other cloud-based systems.
Cloud- Native – the benefits
If you want to be sure that your organisation is leveraging cloud-native software, ask yourself whether you are benefitting from these four areas:
- Scalability: A cloud-native insurance platform allows users to increase or decrease their usage based on their changing needs – without the need for any additional hardware or any software downloads. For instance, if an MGA needs more computing power because they’ve just partnered with a new underwriter, a cloud-native platform can scale up to accommodate. Alternately, say a broker offers a top new cyber product, a cloud-native platform can expand as needed to meet increased demand.
- Cost-effectiveness: The users’ hardware and maintenance costs are all wrapped up in the monthly SaaS subscription fee, meaning you never pay for more capacity than you need. [1] Also, with cloud-native software you get instant access to the latest features and enhancements developed by the vendor.
- Working on the move: A cloud-native platform is accessible from any device, anywhere, with a good internet connection and the right security access. Brokers and agents can download documents, such as claims and premium data, to their phone and make deals in clients’ offices without needing to contact their own office. Claims adjusters can enter clients’ risk profile details in real-time from any claims location with just a few clicks. MGAs can agree new capacity deals with carriers without needing to head back to their desk. This is insurance on the move, and only a true born-in-the-cloud platform enables this level of flexibility and accessibility.
- Iron-clad security: True born-in-the-cloud platforms come with top cyber security measures that ensure you are 100% compliant with all customer and client data privacy legislation in every jurisdiction in which you operate. The chances of losing client data or being hacked are incredibly remote. Salesforce, for instance, has security built into every layer of its platform. The infrastructure layer comes with replication, backup, and disaster recovery planning.
- Born-in-the-cloud, now six years old: Novidea’s insurance platform was born-in-the-cloud in 2017, and built on Big Data firm Salesforce’s platform. It took time, focus, extensive resources and specialist expertise, along with our insurance market know-how.
Book a meeting now to discover why we now have over 100 customers in 22 countries enjoying the above benefits. You can too, while effectively managing the entire customer journey, end-to-end, with greater operational efficiencies, reduced costs, and accelerated growth.