Charles Taylor InsureTech improves agility and security with OCI
The insurance tech provider boosts performance, scalability, and security by migrating SaaS applications to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
“With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, we were able to improve the performance of our insurance applications, INSIS and INSOR, and design a comprehensive security architecture around them. We can now provision resources needed to support our customers at lightning speed while keeping costs to a minimum.”
Business challenges
Working with reinsurers, carriers, brokers, and insurance agents, Charles Taylor InsureTech’s offerings include INSIS—a policy administration system—and INSOR—a reporting and data management system. These critical workloads require a highly scalable cloud-based solution that quickly and easily provisions resources.
However, its enterprise applications were delivering poor performance, especially during peak usage times. Running multiple workloads that contained sensitive customer data, the company also required extensive security features to ensure compliance with international regulations, such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Charles Taylor InsureTech also needed detailed reporting and analytics capabilities to make faster and better-informed decisions. The company considered a multicloud approach with Azure to modernize legacy systems and facilitate a seamless cloud journey.
With the multiple Oracle Cloud regions that are already in place, we can offer our customers peace of mind with a clear disaster recovery strategy.
Why Charles Taylor chose Oracle
Charles Taylor InsureTech selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) because it offered numerous capabilities that were essential in supporting its clients’ workloads, while ensuring maximum availability of its enterprise applications and minimizing costs.
The company identified OCI as the preferred cloud solution due to Oracle Interconnect for Azure, which was critical in supporting the legacy modernization of its customers through a multicloud architecture.
Using OCI, Charles Taylor InsureTech deploys a new environment faster with half of its previous costs, protects sensitive data with a comprehensive security architecture, and supports a multicloud strategy.
Results
By moving its Java-built INSIS and INSOR applications to Oracle WebLogic Server and Enterprise Database Service on OCI, Charles Taylor InsureTech improved elastic scalability on demand for optimal performance during peak usage times—such as at the end of the month, quarter, or year—while scaling down during off-peak periods to minimize total cost of ownership.
Using OCI Virtual Cloud Network, the company could deploy a new environment in less than three days, as opposed to months previously. In addition to launching subnets with Oracle WebLogic Server, the company stacked each layer with a private subnet to secure its databases. As a result, the company reported faster time to market and a cost reduction of 50% for its non-production environments.
As part of its multicloud strategy, the company leaned on OCI’s interconnection with Microsoft Azure. The interconnect between Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure provided a performant multicloud solution that enabled Charles Taylor to link its INSIS and INSOR applications with its customers’ enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems—hosted on-premises or with different cloud providers—through a private, dedicated, low-latency connection.
With Oracle GoldenGate, Charles Taylor collected data from multiple sources, such as policy administration and document management systems, and sent the unified data back to its Oracle Enterprise Database Service and INSOR application on OCI for reporting and insurance document modeling. In addition, the company used Oracle Data Integrator to automate manual integration tasks needed to connect databases, enabling Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) processes to complete much faster.
Charles Taylor InsureTech also used Oracle Analytics to build accurate reports. With data constantly synchronized between its databases and data warehouses, the company tapped Oracle Integration Cloud to give its customers the capability to integrate with other systems—including fraud detection or machine learning—to generate reports required for their business.
In addition, the company used numerous Oracle Cloud data centers across the globe to store data copies across multiple availability domains, strengthening the disaster recovery strategy it offers to customers. The organization adopted Oracle Active Data Guard and Oracle Real Application Clusters to deliver Maximum Availability Architecture, guaranteeing 24/7 availability of its enterprise applications in case of an unexpected outage of the primary database.
Using Oracle Cloud Guard, the Charles Taylor InsureTech protected customer data with 100% isolation and gained a unified view of cloud security across OCI customer tenants. With Oracle Cloud Guard Threat Detector, the company detected misconfigured resources and suspicious activities across child tenants, and provided its IT team with visibility to drill down and solve cloud security issues. This ensured that sensitive data was protected and fully compliant with international regulations, such as GDPR.
Partners
To deploy its enterprise applications on OCI, Charles Taylor InsureTech collaborated closely with Cintra, an Oracle Platinum Partner. The collaboration enabled Charles Taylor to focus on the deployment of innovative insurance applications, while Cintra took care of infrastructure provisioning and maintenance.
About the customer
Charles Taylor InsureTech is an insurance technology business that offers a suite of SaaS technology solutions for insurers, brokers, MGAs, and insurance-related affinity businesses that drive client outperformance and a great end-customer experience.