Carriers Should Embrace Virtualization

Every insurer needs to embrace virtualization technologies in order to increase flexibility, speed and cost conservation.

The foundational infrastructure concepts that any company needs to follow are:

• Creating and adhering to a set of guiding principles that emphasize what is most important to an enterprise. These principles include things such as keeping the technology environment simple; making sure the appropriate focus is on security and compliance; buying and configuring, versus building or customizing; having a tight coupling with business needs; reuse versus replication; and having a strategic plan and employing tactical solutions only when required, and then only when they do not preclude the successful implementation of enterprise strategies.,

• Building a reference architecture and process that enable implementation of technologies within that reference model, ensuring a match between industry business models and solution patterns. The reference architecture should be a living document. Review the reference architecture, taking advantage of new technologies and techniques on a regular basis.,

• Establishing governance groups, such as standards, security and architecture review boards.,

• Following lean and agile development life cycles and project processes. Automate as much as possible, reuse when you can and implement relevant support tools.,

In addition, every insurer needs to embrace virtualization technologies in order to increase flexibility, speed and cost conservation. There is a cost to dedicated resources. In the current regulatory environment, unplanned demands are generating huge increases in base cost related to storage, networking and compute power on top of the necessary costs for business resilience. Harnessing virtualization technologies from storage, networking, computer and software providers is a must in moving to a shared-resource, lower-base-cost model.