The Risks of Hazard

This blog is a joint collaboration between Ivan Maddox and Susan Parks.

Cloud computing has rapidly become the method of choice for countless applications across many industries. Insurance is a relative newcomer to cloud computing, but most software solutions for insurance now at least offer a cloud option (if it’s not entirely based in the cloud). However, there are still concerns that cloud computing is not the right technology for insurance solutions. Those concerns are usually based on a misconception, though. To help clear things up, here are four common myths about “the cloud” debunked.

Myth #1: It is unreliable.

The opposite is usually the case. Most providers of cloud services (most commonly, Microsoft and Amazon) bend over backwards to offer backup options, and the cloud can actually be more reliable than other types of infrastructure platforms. The cloud provider can easily back up data to multiple locations to provide an additional level of protection through redundancy. Usually, the cloud service provider and the application vendors will automatically send you emails updating you on critical events.

These days, business software (and technology in general) evolves faster than ever before. Users have access to rapidly improving analytics based on huge datasets; flexibility on how questions are asked; and — most importantly — how answers are received and interpreted.

In the past 10 years or so, business systems have moved from desktop-based programs to much more dynamic applications that are simultaneously more specialized and more universal. Business solutions now leverage more data to deliver answers that are very specific to an industry, to an organization, and to specific users. There are several technological cornerstones that make today’s systems so powerful, and one of them is the Application Programming Interface, or API.

How do APIs play such a big role in today’s software? Well, they're like LEGO blocks.

Underwriting property insurance is a very complex operation, with limitless variety on methods of management. I tend to concentrate on the risk associated with natural catastrophes damaging a location, but that is actually just a small part of the overall process. How an underwriter receives requests for quotes, builds quotes, and sends them out (not to mention how that quote affects a book’s accumulation) is an intricate process. What is so interesting to me is how software solutions are solving the inherent problems associated with underwriting as a whole.

The Risks of Hazard blog is devoted to the exploration of natural catastrophe risk, and how to better understand it for insurance. An important aspect of the topic is how the analytics can be delivered. The software that delivers the analytics is as important as the analytics themselves.

Cloud computing is driving a software revolution as astonishing as any other computing revolution of the past 40 years. With the processors and memory moved to the cloud, along with the advance in both of those aspects of computing, it is now possible to build software solutions that would have been impossible 5 years ago. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (Sass) are the only ways in which innovative software products are being built now. And they are being built to work on the next generation of IT infrastructure being installed by forward-thinking companies everywhere, like Allianz.