Reimagining Insurance Data Management: Don’t Miss the Shot

“Wait, wait! Let me get my camera,” my mom would shout, whenever we kids did something on family vacation that she thought would make a nice addition to one of her dozens of photo albums. She almost always missed the shot and usually ended up insisting we stage an awkward recreation so she could “capture the moment for posterity!

Mom loved to take pictures, but I swear she spent less time snapping photos than she did futzing around with her camera equipment — and there was a lot of equipment. Cameras in the ‘80s were so bulky I bet mom toted an extra 10 pounds everywhere she carried her camera, lenses and all those rolls of 35mm film — ISO 100 for sunny days, ISO 400 for cloudy days and ISO 800 for evenings.

Mom captured a lot of moments, but she could have captured more were she not hampered by the technology limitations of her time – a fact that she admitted just a few years ago before she passed, when my son handed her his iPhone. He taught her to use it in under 30 seconds, and without missing a beat she exclaimed, “If I’d had this 40 years ago, I wouldn’t have needed that hip replacement!” 

Most of us no longer pack separate cameras for vacation. In fact, according to one recent study, most of us don’t even own them,¹ and even those who do barely use them. After all, why risk a hip replacement when you can just use your smartphone to take high-quality pictures, seamlessly save them to the cloud, and instantly publish them to social media or share them with your family and friends?

Sadly, too many insurance carriers are like my mom in this story: So busy fumbling around with brittle legacy technology that they miss the shot. They are too stuck doing things the way they’ve always done them to realize that today there’s a better way. A 2022 survey of 600 chief data officers from a cross-section of industries globally reveals that most companies have more than 1,000 data sources, expect that number to increase in 2023, and use five or more separate data management tools to stitch it all together.²

But the days of shopping around for so-called best-of-breed point solutions, negotiating separate contracts, guessing at proper storage and compute sizing, and then cobbling it all together with brittle integrations are over (or should be). Modern insurance carriers have a modern data management option — effectively a “smartphone” for data, to make sure they never miss a shot again.

Today’s data management “smartphone” is the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC). This powerful, scalable, cost-effective, AI/ML-driven, API- and microservices-based, SaaS cloud packages every data management service you need into a single platform that’s purpose built to help you get business value from your data. 

IDMC gives you the same type of access to your data management services that your smart phone gives you to your apps: seamless, intuitive, and immediate. But unlike Facebook, TikTok, and Words-With-Friends, IDMC gives you services for data ingestion, data integration, change data capture, data replication, data governance, data quality, data catalog, data lineage and master data management — all democratized through a data marketplace that lets you browse, search, find and understand the data you need in an intuitive online “shopping” experience.

IDMC even has free services like Cloud Data Integration-Free and Data Loader, letting you start small, gain value and then scale.

In addition to the smartphone-like access described above, IDMC also gives insurance carriers smartphone-like flexibility — you only pay for the services you use, in the same way you only pay for smartphone apps you want.

This smartphone-like experience is particularly powerful when you consider modern architectural design patterns like data mesh and data fabric. Because both approaches seek to integrate the data estate through loose integrations rather than tight, brittle couplings, both demand the kind of elasticity, scalability, and flexibility inherent in IDMC’s subscription-based SaaS model.

Data mesh federates data product management to domains interconnected through a universal syntax and standards interoperability layer, while data fabric applies an AI-driven “single plane of glass” across a vast and complicated data landscape. Both, however, depend on the ability to rapidly adjust their data ingestion, integration, governance, quality, metadata rationalization and other data management requirements in order to respond to (often unpredictable) business dynamics caused by market fluctuations, M&A activity or other compelling events.

Finally, while a smartphone isn’t cheap, it’s certainly less than the combined cost of a scientific calculator, encyclopedia set, flashlight, Garmin GPS, wallet, atlas, TV, radio, CB-radio and camera (along with lenses, film, bag, development expenses and photo albums).

Moreover, the smartphone’s flexibility and ease of use make it more valuable than the sum of its parts. The same is true of the Intelligent Data Management Cloud, where flexibility and ease of use let you focus less on evaluating, procuring, purchasing, integrating and retiring tools, and more on meaningfully supporting your insurance business imperatives. 

Informatica is a leader in each Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ in which it participates.^3,4We pioneered the Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) to help businesses deliver data that’s fit for business use, from virtually anywhere in your data estate to virtually every link of your insurance value chain. 

IDMC is the world’s most comprehensive intelligent data management cloud — elastic, serverless, open source, API/microservices-driven and cloud-native. It’s purpose-built to help companies connect, unify, govern and democratize their data — whether on-premises, in the cloud or hybrid — to drive better business value.  

Don’t miss the shot — bring your data to life with Informatica IDMC today: https://www.informatica.com/platform.html

_{¹https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000023.000023552.html
²Informatica, CDO Insights 2023: How to Empower Data-Led Business Resiliency, 2022
³Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools, Ehtisham Zaidi, Sharat Menon, Robert Thanaraj, Nina Showell, August 17, 2022
⁴Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Solutions, Ankush Jain, Melody Chein, November 1, 2022}