Insuring a Tofflerian World

The insurance sector in India is gradually transforming itself through the
deployment of insurance solutions, portals, mobile-computing, document
management, and not to forget, work flow technologies for enhancing operational
efficiencies. Max New York Life too has leveraged technology to ensure a
paperless transaction support system, taking the day-to-day transactions with
regard to customer engagement and business needs online. This has resulted in
meeting business goals and at the same time being cost-effective and
environment-friendly.

Within the organizational landscape, the IT Infrastructure at Max New York
Life Insurance forms the core of business operations. The IT infrastructure
covers business needs from front-end sales to back-end operational support. The
company has a state-of-the-art lights out data center at Gurgaon, along with a
disaster recovery site at Mumbai.

Both these centers host the latest versions of servers, network
(LAN/WAN/telecom) equipments, monitoring equipments, high-end storage and
back-up devices. The data center is well supported by high caliber UPS, air
conditioning systems, and security systems. In addition to the data center and
DR site, the IT infrastructure also includes high-end laptops, desktops, office
support, automation software, and business applications. There is a well
designed private network which covers and extends itself to all the offices of
Max New York Life Insurance across India.

The banking and insurance sector has to overcome the challenges of reaching
out to its customers, irrespective of language diversity and optimization of
costs. With due focus and investment in technology, a company can overcome these
challenges by using the latest technology.

New Deployments

"We have rolled out multiple deployments in line with our strategic business
needs including customer portal, customer service, IVR, lead management,
reinsurance application, etc. While the re-insurance application has limited the
liability on specific risks; IVR has ensured increased productivity. From pure
technology perspective, we have introduced .NET based applications for the first
time in the company as it fits into the technology guiding principle we have at
the company level. In addition, we have also introduced Day Batch Automation
System and a couple of Open Systems too," says Hitesh Arora, executive vice
president and head, IT, Max New York Life Insurance.

Even though cloud computing is still at the evolution stage in terms of usage
in the insurance sector with regulatory constraints on utilizing hosting
services outside India, on account of data privacy issues, this has not deterred
Max New York Life Insurance from taking to cloud computing. The company has
certainly leveraged virtualization at the server end, having successfully
migrated over hundred odd servers to sixteen. This has lowered the hardware
maintenance costs. The server consolidation has also resulted in the optimum
space utilization and prevention of one application from impacting the others
when upgrades or changes were made.

Furthermore, it has helped in developing a standard virtual server build that
could be easily duplicated to speed up server deployment. The deployment of
lights out data center and virtualization at the DC level are also some of its
other significant green IT initiatives. The company is currently experimenting
with desktop virtualization.

Atreyee Datta

atreyeed@cybermedia.co.in