Kyndryl recently announced a collaboration with RSA Insurance to migrate more than 85,000 gigabytes of information to the cloud to accelerate RSA’s transformation to a 21st century digital enterprise. Maintaining RSA’s day-to-day operations during the migration was critical, along with security, regulatory compliance and numerous other issues facing the insurance industry. We caught up with Kyndryl Client Partner Executive Shahira Brennan for a deeper dive into what this project means for RSA, and its implications for the insurance industry generally.
Q: Insurance is one of those products that everybody has, but nobody thinks about. What are some of the major issues facing the industry?
Shahira Brennan: It’s true that the insurance industry can have a somewhat unexciting image, but it’s as vital to innovation and overall economic growth as banking and finance. In Western culture alone, you can look back to the early 17th Century to see how the industry was essential in codifying, predicting and protecting against risk for shipping and international trade, and later for enterprises such as railroads, industrial manufacturing and energy exploration – critical drivers of the global economy, then and now.
In the digital era, the insurance industry faces the enormous challenges related to the explosion of data – how to process, store and protect it; how to glean actionable insights from it; how to capitalize on those insights to speed innovation; and how to serve customers where they live and when they consume. All of this has to happen amid fierce competition from the insurtech sector, against the backdrop of constant threats to data security and privacy, and under the strict scrutiny of regulatory entities in every market where an insurer does business.
Q: What are companies like RSA doing to manage these industry challenges?
Brennan: To stay ahead of the competition, established enterprises have to work better and faster – whether that means developing innovative products and services, or automating back-office operations. The ability to gather, manage and mine data is critical to both of those initiatives. And being able to execute in an IT environment that’s agile, scalable, resilient and secure is the difference between success and failure. Companies know this, but they typically lack the technical skills to design, build and manage the right systems. And they also don’t have access to the people with the combination of industry expertise and technical mastery needed to take on these projects. That’s why partnerships are so important, as Kyndryl brings both expertise and distinguished service delivery to the table.
Q: What were some of RSA’s unique issues?
Brennan: RSA wanted to speed up processing time dramatically, and migrating their operations to the cloud from their legacy IT estate boosted automated data processing speeds by 30 percent. This was a huge improvement for a system that handles data related to roughly 4.5 million insurance policies. Next, RSA needed to be positioned to take advantage of the best-in-class software innovations that run in the cloud environment. And they needed to modernize to a solutions development environment for which the number of skilled professionals is growing. Finally, RSA needed access to the latest cyber resiliency innovations – protection against cyber attacks, system recovery capabilities, regulatory compliance – and they needed to put these changes in place quickly, and without disrupting their ongoing operations. Kyndryl has been able to meet RSA’s expectations as part of a great partnership in service to this important customer.