Insurers See Clouds on the Horizon
A Call to the Cloud
Although all of PURE’s call centers are staffed by its own member services employees, the technology that serves as the backbone for call routing is a cloud-based hosted solution from a third-party provider that then routes calls to PURE employees, based on the rules that the carrier defines within the cloud provider’s system.
“Aside from giving us the ability to have people working throughout the country through one system regardless of the office they’re in, this arrangement give us unbelievable disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities,” Tainsky notes. “When a disaster hits, even if people can’t get to work, they can still handle claims from their homes or via their cell phones.”
[The Age of Big Bang IT Projects Is Over.]
PURE also has a vendor/partner that hosts the entire messaging component of its business, including email, IM, BlackBerrys and iPhones. Tainsky explains that PURE decided to go with a hosted environment for messaging because it’s very difficult, expensive and time-consuming to implement, and there are many compliance requirements around it. Most important, though, messaging isn’t viewed as strategic for the organization.
“We found the best partner we could to host and manage this entire area for us in a secure cloud-based solution,” Tainsky says. “Now we have an unbelievable messaging solution that competes with any other organization, with all the functionality we need and that meets compliance requirements,” he adds. “And we don’t have anyone here who needs to worry about this aside from managing the relationship with the vendor.”
PURE also has addressed the security concerns around cloud and hosted solution, Tainsky reports, emphasizing that the company is very careful about what it puts in the public cloud and what it puts in the secure private cloud. “We do business with many different providers, but one thing that’s consistent is that they must have tight security around their organizations,” Tainsky points out. “We ensure the right security protocols are in place with each vendor. We make sure they have SAS 70 Type 2 and a tight security policy, and we request copies of the results for the testing of the security policy. If a vendor has never done this before or has weakness in the security area, we will pass.”
Tainsky says his firm has chosen this model on purpose. “It’s serving us well, and if the things we’re outsourcing now aren’t working, we’ll bring them back in,” he adds.
Peggy Bresnick Kendler has been a writer for 30 years. She has worked as an editor, publicist and school district technology coordinator. During the past decade, Bresnick Kendler has worked for UBM TechWeb on special financialservices technology-centered ... View Full Bio
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