A recent survey by Capgemini found that 78% of insurance executive interviewed cited big data analytics as the disruptive force that will have the biggest impact on the insurance industry.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that unfortunately traditional data management strategies do not scale to effectively govern large data for high-performance analytics.

To overcome this obstacle leading insurers of all types and sizes are harnessing the power of big data by deploying a Hadoop data environment and combining that with high-performance analytics.

Hadoop has caught the attention of many organizations searching for better ways to store, process and analyze large volumes and varieties of data from multiple internal and external sources.
The advantages of Hadoop are:

• It’s cost-effective – Hadoop uses lower-cost commodity hardware to reliably store large quantities of data
• It’s scalable – Hadoop provides flexibility to expand out by simply adding more nodes
• It’s adaptable – Ability to store any type of data in its original format

One insurance company that recognized the power of big data, but realized that its existing infrastructure wasn’t adequate to make use of the growing and diverse data volume was Markerstudy, a rapidly expanding UK insurer. In 2014, Markerstudy embarked on a big data project and decided to implement Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub environment with SAS Analytics. The initial focus for this project was to enhance the performance and capabilities of its rating engine however the project quickly expanded to include new data sources to benefit other areas of operations including claims fraud, and customer insight (gaining a 360-degree view). The success of the project was more or less instantaneous with a ROI within 5 months. Read more about the Markerstudy Case Study.

In addition, to learn more about how other insurance companies are using big data for competitive advantage download the SAS and Cloudera white paper “Driving Growth in Insurance with a Big Data Architecture”  or view the on-demand webinar with Markerstudy CIO, Dan Fiehn, talking about how Markerstudy are transforming their business with SAS Analytics and Cloudera’s Enterprise Data Hub.

I’m Stuart Rose, Director, Global Insurance Practice at SAS. For further discussions, connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.