Nippon Life Insurance, IBM Join for Cloud Initiative

Osaka-based Nippon Life Insurance is working with IBM Japan (Tokyo) to build a cloud-based development and test environment for mission critical Web systems.

The new cloud environment will allow developers in Nippon’s IT department, NissayIT, to procure new test and development environments in hours — a process that previously could take up to a month, the companies claim.

“The average enterprise devotes up to 50 percent of its entire technology infrastructure to development and test, but typically up to 90 percent of it remains idle,” IBM says in a statement. “IBM has seen that taking advantage of cloud computing within development and testing environments can help reduce IT labor costs by 50 percent, improve quality and drastically reduce time to market.”

NissayIT will maintain a traditional test environment that allocates resources in a fixed format as a control, the companies say. The traditional test environment can be transformed to the cloud in the future.

IBM is also working in the Asian market with South Korea’s Dongbu Insurance. The companies signed a seven-year IT infrastructure agreement earlier this year.

Nathan Golia is senior editor of Insurance & Technology. He joined the publication in 2010 as associate editor and covers all aspects of the nexus between insurance and information technology, including mobility, distribution, core systems, customer interaction, and risk ... View Full Bio