Future-proof cloud partnership for Life and Pensions
Like so many other industries, cloud has been a fixture on the horizon of Life and Pensions for some time.
But as the imperative to migrate from old legacy systems to new cloud applications and infrastructure becomes unignorable, providers need to choose a transformation partner carefully.
That’s because, while many headline benefits of moving your core IT systems to the cloud are well-established, they’re only half the story for an industry as complex and high-risk as Life and Pensions.
You’re playing by different rules to the “move fast and break stuff” crowd. You’re not just changing the very foundations of your business in-flight—you also need to build something future-proof to ensure you don’t unintentionally end up somewhere just as inflexible and restrictive as the legacy systems you’re moving from.
This blog is about what Life and Pensions providers need to achieve long-term success when moving to the cloud—and what to look out for when choosing a partner for the journey.
Let’s dive in.
The essential qualities of future-proof SaaS for pension and life insurance
From a purely practical perspective, you need a partner that’s focused on the pension and life insurance industry. You need help from people that have strong experience of implementing, running and optimizing modern, cloud-based policy administration environments.
Indeed, unleashing the full potential of your cloud transformation will require an environment underpinned by specific principles built around the true needs of the industry. Principles like:
Dev-First: so you can empower your own people to configure and customize your environment to handle the unique (and ever-changing) needs of your business and your customers.
API-centric: so that you can open up your policy data and your business systems to the rapidly expanding Life and Pensions ecosystem.
Dev-Ops empowered: so that you can quickly test, launch and iteratively improve new features and functionality, drastically cutting the cycle time on innovation and business value.
Secure: so that you have the optimal protection against ever-evolving external threats and can meet ever-changing compliance requirements.
Elastic and scalable: so that you can meet the complex needs of your business from day to day, and also grow over time.
With a platform that offers these qualities and support from a partner with strong pension and life insurance experience, you can unleash some powerful advantages.
Embrace the full benefits of cloud
One of the main attractions of cloud is gaining freedom from the shackles of your on-premises systems, and the ability to scale and operate with maximum flexibility. Yet many cloud solutions have strong dependencies on specific platforms, providers, technologies and standards—making it all too easy to sleepwalk into yesterday’s constraints.
So you should look for a partner that can offer you true flexibility—offering a solution that leverages the full capabilities of the infrastructure its built on, but isn’t fixed to any short-term technology trends.
Lumera currently runs its customers’ environments in the Azure cloud—to benefit from its scalability, elasticity, performance and security, as well as its industry-leading feature set, like Azure Synapse data analytics. But far from being locked-in, Lumera itself is nimble, clean and flexible enough to evolve with however the public cloud space develops.
One major driver of this flexibility is the fact that Lumera is built using stateless services and can be deployed as a mesh of nodes. This enables horizontal redundancy for extra capacity and the vertical separation of concerns to support multiple different areas of functionality. Together these capabilities guarantee maximum flexibility, elasticity and scalability. And Lumera’s software is containerized, so it can run on any cloud, keeping a whole world of possibilities open.
What does cloud partnership with Lumera look like?
We’ve helped countless Life and Pensions providers like you see past the vague potential of the cloud and dig into what they really need to sustain their business long-term.
Here’s what cloud partnership with Lumera brings you:
Constant updates for continual readiness
Every Lumera customer gets regular, cloud-based performance, security and maintenance updates as standard. And because our offering is standardized, every customer shares the same feature upgrades as part of our ongoing product development roadmap.
Crucially, you’ll be working with a partner that’s focused on what the future holds, with a keen eye on how the needs of pension and life insurance businesses are evolving.
Analyze the future more clearly
Data is the lifeblood of your business strategy. You have to be able to use your data in whatever ways you choose, which requires a flexible policy administration environment. You also need to have access to the very latest analytics tools—such as Microsoft Azure’s advanced Synapse service—so that you can make accurate predictions. With Lumera, you can fully unleash the strategic data opportunities the cloud makes possible.
Policy administration capacity
The scalability that results from Lumera’s architecture is especially valuable to pension and life insurance organizations. The cyclical scheduled policy administration jobs that currently cause peaks and pinch points—from daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual workloads—simply stop being a problem.
Best possible security
You get the very best possible security through Lumera’s policy administration environment. That’s partly thanks to the Azure cloud, where Microsoft applies security resources at such scale that smaller operators simply can’t compete. But it’s also a facet of building our security on well-understood standardized software components that—while customizable around your needs—are still secured in consistent ways.
Round-the-clock peace of mind
The potent mix of Lumera’s technology and the Microsoft Azure cloud means that you get outstanding reliability with always-on support. This far surpasses any level of service you could expect from an on-premises solution and, indeed, from other SaaS providers.
Long-term cloud success through a partnership built on true Life and Pensions expertise
Lumera is more than just a software provider. It has strong industry expertise, and vast experience of managing pension and life insurance data. Whatever your questions or concerns over cloud—and the needs of your business will surely be unique—you should talk to Lumera today and find out how we can help.
