Disrupting insurance industry with DevOps

Insurance companies are now focusing on digitizing their operations for reaching out to customers via apps and online services. They are also focusing on employing big data analytics for everything, right from telematics to fraud prevention. Utilization of DevOps in insurance industry is helping insurers in achieving these and other such ambitious objectives.

Insurance industry leaders are facing the challenge to move their organizations to the next level and that definitely means digital transformation. They need to embrace new technologies and implement innovative digital business models for keeping pace with industry disruptors. But there are barriers. Digital transformation initiatives are complex and the prospect of implementing large-scale changes is daunting. DevOps in insurance and related sectors can help in overcoming some of these challenges. But what exactly are these challenges plaguing the insurance industry?

These challenges can broadly be classified into the following:

Business Challenges

• Competitive business environment is driven by insurance aggregators and comparison shopping.
• Reducing margins and increasing cost base.
• Insurance technology firms attempting to disrupt new business models.
• Using data and analytics to produce better customer experiences and more efficient operations.

Technology Challenges

• There is a need to build better digital channel applications that are personalized and data-driven.
• Ever-increasing regulation hampers insurance company’s ability to deliver and innovate.
• There is also the need for delivering better digital channel experiences over web and mobile.

DevOps in Insurance: the solution

DevOps is an emerging model that provides an effective solution for accelerating digital transformation in core areas of operation. DevOps helps in optimizing the way organizations deliver value for their customers and shareholders. It also promotes an agile and flexible delivery approach that facilitates a cross-functional environment, along with creating a culture of continuous improvement.

In industry, time to market is directly related to success. A DevOps model helps insurance companies in developing and deploying technology rapidly by enabling successful IT transformation across complex architectures. Thus, establishing a standardized infrastructure environment helps in supporting timely changes. Capabilities such as analytics and software automation are introduced, thereby producing better customer experiences and more efficient operations.

DevOps in Insurance: the benefits

The benefits accrued by adopting DevOps as the solution to the challenges listed above include:

DevOps in Insurance: Increased Speed to Market

• It helps in expanding the breadth of offerings outside of core markets
• It also improves the ability to react to regulatory change
• It also bring changes to products for rapidly meeting market demands

DevOps in Insurance: Improved Operating Efficiency

• It reduces call center volumes
• It also helps in implementing self-service portals
• It can leverage third-party integrations

DevOps in Insurance: IT Consolidation

• It reduces maintenance budgets
• It helps in rationalizing vendor tools and vendors
• It also facilitates simplification of the IT environment

Thus, by ensuring agility and continuous improvement, insurance companies are setting themselves up for long-term success. Implementation of DevOps facilitates the adoption of new technologies and innovative business models that helps in increasing the flow of development and deployment while maintaining quality, reliability, and security for its customers.