Technology and application modernization is changing the insurance sector by transforming business operations, reshaping customer experiences, and expanding offerings. Specifically, P&C SaaS applications like Duck Creek OnDemand are centralizing and simplifying insurance service delivery by providing the applications insurers need to stay competitive in today’s marketplace.
However, SaaS solutions need a robust, reliable, and secure cloud provider to ensure performance, reliability, scalability, and security. That’s why Duck Creek Technologies has teamed up with Microsoft to provide a secure, evergreen, and resilient platform for Property, Casualty, and General Insurance providers.
This blog post will break down the why, and the how, to help your organization define or refine your digital transformation strategy and journey. It will help you understand more of Duck Creek’s perspective and how our partnership with Microsoft to deliver Duck Creek OnDemand on Microsoft Azure brings all the benefits to your organization. We’ve done the work to deliver leading cloud transformation to our customers so that they can reap the rewards of our joint technology with confidence that it meets current and future business needs.
Why Azure for insurance
The combination of Duck Creek’s cloud platform, AI, and data, supports our cloud strategy with Microsoft Azure, which helps insurers bring new solutions to life for today’s challenges and tomorrow’s goals. Azure enables businesses to build, run, and manage applications and services across multiple clouds, on-premises, and at the edge, with the tools and frameworks that meet the needs of the organization.
As a result, Duck Creek’s customers discover many benefits when looking to transition to cloud solutions. Azure delivers comprehensive security and proactive compliance, the flexibility to build and deploy any framework or language, and continuous innovation to support the business today and tomorrow.
It’s also a smoother transition for insurers already relying on Microsoft solutions, including Microsoft 365 productivity solutions, Windows Server, SQL Server databases, and mission-critical Windows apps. Integrating Azure into the ecosystem is straightforward and efficient.
Many insurers are already using Azure because it provides more flexibility to deploy in a private, public, or hybrid capacity, helping customers feel more comfortable and confident about embracing and transitioning to cloud solutions.
Best of all, Azure makes it easier to deploy and run Duck Creek OnDemand quickly with a scalable, cost-effective solution that integrates seamlessly with existing technology investments.
Insurance-specific use cases for Azure
How, exactly, can Azure help transform insurance? Let’s look at four industry-specific use cases.
- Transforming policyholder experiences: Azure helps deliver differentiated policyholder experiences through deeper insights and relationships. From accelerating time to resolution and increasing wallet share with personalized, AI-augmented customer experiences to bringing together disparate data sources for a holistic customer view, Azure enables real-time insights and proactive engagement.
- Empowering employees and agents: Azure fosters improved productivity through better teamwork, insights, and communications. With the tools, data, and insights needed to improve efficiency and empower any workforce, Azure simplifies collaboration across teams, centralizes access to key resources, and enables real-time engagement with modern communication tools.
- Managing risk and compliance: Azure can help improve risk modeling, facilitate regulatory compliance, and protect against claims and underwriting fraud. Azure offers faster modeling, deeper insights on at-risk assets, advanced financial projections, and fraud safeguards.
- Modernizing core operations: Azure enables the transformation of key processes in the cloud to bring new products to market quickly. Azure makes it possible to move to the cloud to reduce costs, enhance processing time, access value-added cloud services, and utilize AI to simplify the claims process for an improved customer experience.
Azure DevOps offers another benefit to insurers, specifically IT teams. Offering an integrated set of tools and services to help manage software projects, DevOps enables better software project management from development and testing to deployment, giving IT teams more control.
Another feature, Azure ExpressRoute offers different ways for insurers to connect to services. For example, ExpressRoute can help an insurance company connect its on-premises legacy system to the cloud to help bridge the gap during digital transformation.
Partnering to benefit insurers: Duck Creek + Microsoft
There are three stages of digital transformation that focus on where the system lives:
With Microsoft, Duck Creek expands the reach of Duck Creek OnDemand, helping more insurers leverage cloud-based solutions to redefine their businesses and customer experiences.
“Azure offers Duck Creek the security, scalability and capability to bring modern innovations to the P&C industry,” said Mike Jackowski, CEO of Duck Creek. “With Azure, we can help empower customers – current and future – to integrate our partner ecosystem to drive results.”
Specifically, Azure helps insurers bridge the gap between on-premises and cloud solutions so migration can take place on the organization’s timing.
For customers with on-premises systems, Azure streamlines Duck Creek OnDemand implementation by allowing customers’ on-premises environment to communicate with Azure, opening opportunities for integration, modernization, and connections with customer-owned systems and Duck Creek’s solutions.
Additionally, insurers can have lines of business (LOBs) that operate differently. If an LOB still needs access to an on-premises legacy system, for example, Azure makes it possible for other LOBs to upgrade to OnDemand and other cloud-based solutions.
“Major P&C insurance companies turn to Duck Creek to optimize the entire end-to-end insurance lifecycle, accelerate product go-to-market initiatives, and deliver an engaging and optimized experience,” says Paul Maher, General Manager, Commercial Marketplace Services at Microsoft. “Our team at Microsoft has found strong alignment and great value in working closely with Duck Creek as a partner.”
Azure features and benefits for insurers
Critical to insurance companies is delivering positive customer experiences that retain and expand customer engagement. For example, services can be streamlined and made more cost effective and flexible—a critical benefit in today’s competitive marketplace. It can also help unlock business value and deepen customer relationships. Azure offers insurers other benefits, including:
- Scalability and extensibility: Organizations pay for what they need, making it easy to scale up or down as the business changes. Even on-premises systems and applications can extend into the cloud for maximum flexibility and access.
- Augmented intelligence: Businesses can personalize and augment the customer experience across all digital channels with powerful AI tools and capabilities.
- Safer customer interactions: Azure makes it possible to enable omnichannel engagement and intelligent self-service while personalizing and safeguarding customer interactions.
- Better insights: Insurers can leverage the cloud for more impactful data analytics and AI-driven insights to transform their business and stay competitive.
- Stronger security, compliance and data privacy: Azure’s integrated business security features and capabilities work across platforms and cloud environments, offers insurance-specific solutions with built-in compliance, and provides transparency and control to ensure data privacy.
- Cost savings: Azure’s cloud platform helps maximize cloud savings and minimizes the overhead accompanying hardware upgrades, third-party solutions, and IT resources.
Deploying Duck Creek on Azure
So, what does that mean for Duck Creek insurance customers? In simple terms, Azure makes the process of deploying Duck Creek OnDemand straightforward and seamless. As a fully managed SaaS solution, Duck Creek OnDemand is easy to implement and start using on day one—no need to wait for a solution to be built and deployed.
Utilizing Azure means insurers can rest easy that business-critical data and applications are in a trusted cloud environment that meets compliance requirements, strengthens security and privacy, and fosters reliability and transparency. Other benefits include:
- Smoother knowledge sharing: When an insurer is already using Azure, knowledge sharing between a vendor and customer is faster and easier because everyone’s using the same tools. It’s akin to speaking the same language.
- Limiting third-party tools: With built-in Azure tooling, it reduces the need for additional third-party tools, lowering costs and eliminating learning curves.
- Easier management: Azure not only makes it easier for customers to oversee their solutions, it enables Duck Creek to manage and troubleshoot as needed.
Better performance: Azure offers high availability and reliable disaster recovery so organizations can feel confident their solutions and data are protected.
Duck Creek and Azure are made for insurance
As technology reshapes more of the insurance industry and as AI is harnessed to redefine offerings, business models, and customer experiences, Azure brings the best of the cloud to organizations that want to modernize their tech stack while staying competitive.
From flexibility and scalability to advanced capabilities and cost-savings, Azure ensures insurance solutions like Duck Creek OnDemand can be deployed and managed easily today and tomorrow.
Get curious with us and join us on the cloud transformation journey. To learn more about how Microsoft Azure and Duck Creek Technologies can help you migrate to the cloud visit www.duckcreek.com/product/duck-creek-ondemand and www.duckcreek.com/partner/microsoft
