CLIENT OVERVIEW
This 100-year-old Midwest property and casualty insurer offers a complete portfolio of personal and commercial insurance, including health and life products. The insurer’s 900+ employees serve more than 900,000 policyholders in 22 states. With combined assets of more than $2 billion, it supports a distribution network of 1,500 agencies and 10,000 independent agents.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Before engaging with ValueMomentum, the insurer manually created and distributed printed reports. It relied on an outdated, on-premises ConnX data infrastructure with multiple data warehouses. Each required individual maintenance and separate pipelines. Maintenance proved costly. Repetitive and overlapping data further contributed to operational inefficiencies. Many business users were not utilizing existing data properly nor contributing to reporting.
To become more data-driven, the insurer determined it was necessary to revamp its data platform and cut maintenance costs. Long-term, they needed a consolidated data warehouse to streamline data access for its business users and deliver data downstream to internal teams, policyholders, and external insurance agencies for regulatory compliance.
SOLUTION OFFERED
As a first step, ValueMomentum helped the insurer regularly generate data and reports from mainframe data and a SQL server that business users could immediately access. ValueMomentum then facilitated a transition to Hadoop, a more scalable and flexible on-premises data platform.
However, maintaining the Hadoop platform and its subsequent upgrades was costly. The insurer then decided to transition to a cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) platform that could cut maintenance costs and drive operational efficiency. ValueMomentum helped identify Snowflake as both the most cost-effective and hands-off solution.
As part of a multi-step data strategy, an initial data assessment revealed entangled pipelines and warehouses with different sets of business users. The first-short term goal was to decommission ConnX, their legacy on-prem data integration solution, and remove expired or underused data pipelines. As a mid-term goal, ValueMomentum began to train users on Snowflake while continuing to maintain the on-premises systems in a hybrid, transitional state. Users needed to experience the new ease of data access to gain confidence in using Snowflake as they decommissioned the old tools.
ValueMomentum was able to “lift-and-shift” the on-premises data warehouses to Snowflake with few changes to the applications and data, enabling continued data access during the transition. Ultimately, ValueMomentum fully consolidated all of the insurer’s data pipelines and warehouses into a single centralized model with one source of truth in the cloud.
ValueMomentum fully consolidated all of the insurer’s data pipelines and warehouses into a single centralized model with one source of truth in the cloud.
VALUE DELIVERED
The insurer’s business users now receive daily data reports as early as 7 a.m. The consolidated data pipeline and warehouse reduced its datasets to a few terabytes, significantly cutting maintenance costs. For continued monitoring and maintenance, the insurer was also able to reduce the support team from seven to three associates.
