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The tech industry is undergoing a huge transformation. From Insurtech to consumer tech, the question isn’t so much who will cause the disruption, but when it will happen and how it will affect people.
The insurance business has seen this trend and has increased its digital transformation efforts across the board.
Automated and accelerated digital adoption. According to recent research, by 2025, 25% of the insurance sector will be automated.
For insurers to break free from legacy technology restrictions and speed their digital transformation initiatives, cloud adoption and migration are becoming increasingly important. Cloud platforms like Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), Google (GCP), and others can help insurers create and deploy applications while benefiting from the pay-per-use model’s increased flexibility and cost reductions. Cloud adoption also frees up key IT resources, allowing them to focus on creating IT rather than managing it. In addition, insurers may update their operations by taking advantage of cloud’s increased availability, scalability, flexibility, and agility.
Within the Indian GI business, several success stories of this Cloud migration technique include:
- Within 2-3 months, revamp digital properties and publish a widely renowned new website.
- Within four weeks, develop an entirely Cloud-based remote risk survey tool to check business hazards.
- Within 6-8 weeks, create complicated AI/ML models for claims fraud and renewal proclivity.
Some insurers have adopted a proactive approach to cloud migration activities, such as the 100 in 100 projects (100 applications migrated to Cloud in 100 days). Others have adopted a more cautious approach, prioritizing medium-impact workloads like digital marketing, distribution, and analytics before transferring high-impact tasks like product management, underwriting & pricing, policy admin & servicing, and claims. In addition, insurers may establish a realistic roadmap by evaluating best-fit platforms (single vs. multi-Cloud), migration technique, data architecture, security, compliance, and other factors.
Each application passes through specific processes on its journey to the cloud, much like an efficient assembly line at a manufacturing plant. These phases involve determining application preparedness, preparing the application for the cloud, choosing whether it must be rebuilt, determining the appropriate cloud target platform, testing and verifying the program, and lastly, deploying it. As a result, successful organizations will be able to expedite their digital transformation.
Planning cloud migration
It is critical that IT executives and business leaders take a step back and thoroughly construct a strategic strategy for cloud migration and application transformation before going to the cloud.
Highly qualified personnel, a thorough understanding of specific business challenges and goals, a thorough assessment of the current application estate, extensive experience performing migrations, and the use of automated processes and specialized tools are all required for a project of this magnitude and complexity.
Preparation before migration
Creating a preparedness plan, also known as constructing the business case, is the first step in the application migration factory procedure. Organizations perform a total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis of their whole application portfolio at this phase.
The following phase involves deciding which programs will be rehosted in their current state, which will be re-platformed to the cloud with minor changes, refactored and rewritten, and will simply be retired and replaced a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution.
The organization then decides where each application should be deployed: public cloud infrastructure, on-premises private cloud, platform as a service (PaaS), containers, hosted private cloud, SaaS, cloud databases, serverless environments, etc. None of this is simple, but it is crucial to the migration’s overall success. Jumping into migration without a plan is a recipe for catastrophe.
Cloud migration is an ongoing, iterative process, not a one-time event. Migration plans should be changed on a sprint-by-sprint basis, and readiness plans should be evaluated on a regular basis. To guarantee ongoing improvement throughout the migration life cycle, make sure you gather and refresh data regularly, modify and prioritize the backlog, and search for significant lessons learned.
Shifting strategies
When firms evaluate their application estate, they frequently realize that some programs must remain on premises for regulatory, security, and business process reasons. And, because rewriting apps involves time and money, not all apps should be redone.
Companies should identify their primary pain points and rank apps according to their importance to the company. Most businesses’ top priorities are often customer-facing, revenue-generating apps that may have unique needs, such as being always online or being able to withstand quick demand changes.
Cloud migration partners collaborate with an organization’s IT staff to guarantee a seamless and effective cloud move. Because every business has unique requirements, cloud migration platforms provide corporate clients the choice of end-to-end enterprise integration or end-to-end application integration. As a result, organizations may swiftly move their workloads to the clod in the first format while being safe and compliant. The organization’s application platform and overall applications will be redesigned in the second form to take advantage of the cloud’s scalability, performance, and cost advantages.
The following are some general guidelines for deciding the migration path for various types of applications:
Lift and shift
Traditional back-end data centres or database applications are suited for lift and shift because shifting to a public cloud platform is rapid and delivers immediate cost savings and performance gains while reducing the business impact that would occur if the application was refactored.
Directly to SaaS
Organizations should transition to SaaS and retire the legacy application if a SaaS solution can deliver the same functionality as the traditional application. Some of the more generic commercial applications, such as sales, marketing, and human resources, are particularly well-suited to SaaS.
Re-platform your infrastructure
A UNIX-to-Linux migration, a simple OS update, or migration of a legacy programme that is approaching end-of-life, such as Windows Server 2008/SQL Server 2008, are all popular cases for re-platforming, which means relocating the programme to the cloud with few adjustments.
Moving to a PaaS environment, which provides cloud-native capabilities without the need for full-blown restructuring, is another option for re-platforming.
Restructuring
Cloud-native capabilities should be used to rework highly customized apps that provide a vital business difference. Companies may reduce expenses, embed security, interact with other apps, and get business insight through artificial intelligence-based data analytics by rewriting programs as cloud-native. All new apps should be created in cloud-native environments in the future.
As businesses scramble to join the cloud revolution, it has become more important than ever to replace outdated processes with more complete solutions. Cloud computing is proven to be a valuable tool that businesses can rely on businesses and the whole industry. Most importantly, cloud computing allows companies to concentrate on their core business model while delegating more of the environment maintenance to the provider.
