Milliman - an Azure Case Study

Milliman – Cloud Innovators in the Life Insurance Industry

Milliman is a great example of a company leveraging Azure extensively and in very innovative ways. In this post I have asked Paul Maher, CTO - Integrate & MG-ALFA, to share some insights on the work his team are doing with Integrate™ (their flagship Cloud solution delivered to the Life Insurance Market) .

Quoting Paul Maher:

"Integrate is an end-to-end, revolutionary cloud-based system for the life insurance market. Built on the Microsoft Azure platform, it reimagines the relationships between people, process and technology.

Integrate clients are able to run large actuarial jobs on-demand year round, benefiting from the Azure platform’s scale and extensibility in a pay-as-you-go business model.

By using Integrate with Azure, Milliman was able to unlock the potential of human capital to drive business, not simply manage it. Integrate, offered as a SaaS solution, and eliminates the need for costly on-premises infrastructure. It also benefits from cloud platform capabilities such as compute power and storage, as well as feature-rich services such as Azure Data Factory and HDInsight.

Benefits of Azure

  • Speeds time-to-market: By taking advantage of Azure and its associated services, we have been able to accelerate the development and time-to-market of the Integrate solution. The Azure platform has been a familiar and intuitive environment for our development team to build the Integrate solution.
  • Provides massive scalability on demand: We fulfill our client’s large computational requirements by taking advantage of Azure’s ability to scale up or down as needed, in a pay-as-you-go pricing model.
  • Reduces IT costs and management: With the Integrate cloud-based solution, Milliman clients pay only for the processing and storage capabilities they need, without having to deploy, manage, and upgrade hardware. With Azure, companies avoid large capital expenses, because the Integrate solution can access high-performance computing resources on demand at a small fraction of what it would cost to own and operate those resources.
  • Supports data management and reporting: Azure Data Factory and HDInsight has provided the capabilities needed to support data management, data manipulation, and reporting requirements for our clients.
  • Delivers security and reliability: Security and reliability are major concerns for financial services companies. That is why Azure, which is run in Microsoft data centers, is a good choice for an industry solution. Azure is an enterprise-grade platform with attendant security and reliability. And, because Microsoft has datacenters worldwide, information can be hosted in jurisdictions

Azure was instrumental in helping us deliver a robust, dynamic risk management solution that stretches the boundaries of what is possible in enterprise computing. With the Microsoft cloud, we have the capabilities and resources needed to rapidly bring an innovative, industry-changing solution to market. As a result, insurance companies worldwide can benefit from sophisticated financial modeling and big data analytics at nominal cost”.

For further information, please use the following resources:

Paul Maher began at a small actuarial firm in the U.K., building pension software, and transitioned to IT roles and leadership positions at Microsoft, KPMG, and others prior to joining Milliman in 2013. He has a passion for building software solutions that help solve challenging business problems. Contact Paul at LinkedIn.