Is Data Obesity Eating Your Insurance Technology Budget?

It’s one thing to have data. It’s another for your data to pull its weight.

The reasoning is simple: if you had all the data in the world but couldn’t access it, would it do you any good? If you had all the data in the world but couldn’t derive actionable insights from it, same story.

No one has all the data in the world. But there are plenty of insurance enterprises out there that can’t extract reliable data from their data centers, due to data loss, corruption or simply … well, overeating.

We’re talking about data obesity. When an insurer collects and stores enormous amounts of data “on the off-chance that someday, for some reason, they will need a tiny sliver of it,” their data centers grow bloated on a quantity-over-quality diet that does not support the health of their organization.

The insurance technology problems are twofold. First, there’s monetary inefficiency.

• Thirty percent “of all physical servers in data centers are effectively comatose – meaning they are consuming energy and therefore costing money, but delivering no useful information,” said Raymond Russell at Information Management. That number – 30 percent – hasn’t budged since 2008.
• According to the CGOC, 69 percent of data stored by most companies has no business, legal or regulatory value.
• The associated storage costs may consume 20 percent of the IT budget.
• Gartner said that companies can save $18 thousand dollars for every gigabyte they ditch.

The second insurance technology problem is the strategic inefficiency.

When your enterprise is suffering from information obesity, finding, parsing and analyzing the data that drives your decision-making processes is something like trying to run your errands astride the Behemoth.

By 2020, the Internet of Things is expected to include 26 billion connected devices, Gartner said, each churning out its own stream of data. How much of that are you going to put on your data center’s plate?

“Companies need to start to implement changes now, or yesterday if … possible,” Russell said.

This is where transitioning to a single-suite insurance software solution can make a palpable difference. When collecting, processing and storing data on a massive scale, you can’t achieve efficiency through human effort alone. The insurance software solution must streamline those processes for you, across your entire organization, so that you don’t lose momentum due to data bloat. Considerations:

• The architecture must be sound and scalable.
• Data modules have to be flexible and consistent.
• The system must meet or exceed industry regulations.
• The insurance software solution should provide a single point of entry for need-to-know users.
• The insights must flow with ease and relevance.

Tall order? We don’t think so. Click here to learn more about the insurance technology solutions we deliver here at Silvervine Software.