Large portions of IndiaFirst Life Insurance Company’s IT workloads continue to remain on-prem. But even as the Mumbai-based insurer starts to move certain parts of its IT to the cloud to fuel innovation, experimentation, and app modernization, it maintains that keeping to a single vendor is wiser than complicating your IT with too many.At the moment, the insurance provider is finalising its cloud roadmap. The company’s data centre is hosted in a managed services mode.
According to Sankaranarayanan Raghavan, the company’s Chief Technology and Data Officer the plan is to move to the cloud certainly. However, it will not be multi-cloud, as the company wants to take the relationship deeper instead of wider.
To evaluate cloud providers for deployment, the IndiaFirst Life is looking at additional services that come along for app modernization; maturity of the cloud provider and the speed with which they are innovating, market share, reliability; licensing benefit that IndiaFirst Life will base on its current stack; core offerings, what is included and what is not; and database offerings, whether anything available on PaaS.
“Our long-term plan is to move any new projects to the cloud followed by a testing environment and rest of the applications and related infrastructure. All the new projects we are doing are going to be born out of the cloud,” said Raghavan.
Raghavan believes that the lack of proper knowledge around implementing and managing the cloud is the highest risk, as it can even derail the purpose. “The first and foremost thing is to have it sorted on the purpose and reason for moving in. The purpose will drive the roadmap, timelines, upskilling or getting resources who have knowledge and expertise in the cloud.”
Talking about the evolving role of enterprise tech leaders, Raghavan said that one must keep a hawk-eye on the new technologies and how those can be leveraged for the respective businesses.
“The advantage today, is that one can experiment without having to spend a lot of time and money. Creating an environment to innovate quickly and collaborate with new tech stack companies is going to be a game-changer for any technology leader,” he added.
The insurance provider recently adapted Low code no-code platform to drive digital initiatives, which will help with better customer experience, reduced time to market, and better ROI.
“We have implemented a first-of-its-kind, Mobile App and Web platform, which even works offline. After this, currently, we are focusing on getting our APIs streamlined to suit partners with varying degrees of digital maturity in a microservices architecture,” Raghavan maintained.
Apart from that, IndiaFirst Life Insurance Company is also betting big on data science. An internal team of data scientists has been created that has been regularly churning out analytical models, both Predictive as well as Prescriptive.
“Our quest is to continuously try and identify any area where we can either impact the top-line or bottom-line, or help in faster & correct decision-making, or attain a quicker time-to-market using the power of data science”, he added.
