CNA connects and protects its data in the cloud

Gaganpreet Randhawa:

I'm Gaganpreet Randhawa, an AVP of the enterprise architecture team at CNA.

CNA is a commercial property and casualty insurance company based out of Chicago, Illinois, where my team is responsible for data analytics space. Insurance companies have mountains and mountains of data, and making that data available to our business customers is very critical and fundamental for our business to survive.

We're seeing a lot of new things in the industry, new data sources, where we take advantage of things that are happening in the marketplace, and then leverage that with our proprietary information and get better in the market. We have acquired a lot of businesses, and we have pretty much every technology that ever existed in our ecosystem. And our goal was how do we get information from all of these different systems into a single place so that we can act on it?

Cloud modernization for us was two-fold. One was we wanted to modernize our data platform, and the second was we want to modernize our applications.

At the end of the day, we did pick Informatica because it checked all the boxes that we were looking for. We had so many legacy platforms, and Informatica did provide us all those connectors to connect to those. We wanted to make sure that as we were moving our data to the cloud, the data is encrypted, and Informatica had that capability.

When we picked the Google Cloud BigQuery as our data warehouse, from a power, speed, flexibility perspective, the environment was solving for that. The main challenge was how do we get the data there? And that's where Informatica came in, and that's how we started our journey. And we were looking for a tool that can connect to all of those and bring the data based on the capabilities of those platforms. We want to bring data near real time so we can use Informatica Mass Ingestion.

Informatica helps us connect to all of those sources, bring the data into Google Data Lake, so that we can make well-curated, trusted data available in a timely fashion. We also want to be part of Informatica's success journey by providing the feedback so that Informatica can create products that meet business needs.