After years of watching from the sidelines and carefully testing the waters, the insurance industry is heading into the cloud. As with insurers' forays into other highly hyped technologies—analytics and big data, mobile, social—the impetus to the cloud comes from customers and competitors, not costs. In a third quarter 2013 survey by Forrester Research, 55% of insurance IT services decision-makers said they plan to invest in software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud applications within the next 12 months to help their companies collaborate with customers.
"In the U.S. especially, I never hear carriers talking about saving money" as their first priority, according to Ellen Carney, principal analyst for insurance e-business and channel strategy at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester. "It's about delivering a better experience, about winning over your competition."
In what Carney calls "the age of the customer," these priorities hold true for both carriers and producers—and for early cloud adopters who already have taken the plunge, as well as for the traditionalists with only a toe in the water vapor.
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