Zurich Insurance upgrades security and service with cloud

November 28, 2022 6:38 AM

Zurich North America HQ — Zurich Insurance's North American headquarters in Schaumburg, Illinois.

Digital Insurance spoke with Eric Sellenberg, technical director, Zurich North America. The insurer recently worked with Hartford, Conn.-based Insurity, a longtime service provider, to upgrade its data operations and user interfaces using the cloud. The upgrade particularly addressed security issues with Zurich's previous data center-based operations. Sellenberg joined Zurich four years ago for his first experience in insurance as part of a long career in IT.

What are the responsibilities of your role at Zurich and in the Insurity migration?

My responsibility is the oversight and ownership for a number of policy administration systems at Zurich. Our underwriters use these systems to enter the exposures and the different criteria that go into creating a policy. Then the systems quote a rate, issue and send the documents down to other systems in our landscape for policy documents, statistical capture and more. My team mostly supports underwriting. The Insurity "Policy Decisions Classic" platform has been in use here for more than 15 years.

We're in mid-flight right now, migrating to Insurity's Policy Decisions Evolution platform. [Internally, Zurich calls both platforms "Zspire," Zurich System for Pricing, Rating and Endorsements.] We were starting to see more and more security issues that were getting more and more difficult to address. We were seeing more and more challenges as we looked to enhance our system because of the age of the components. They wouldn't do some of the things we were hoping that they would do. At the beginning of the year, there was a consensus amongst our leadership here that the time was right.

What were the goals for your migration of policy administration to Insurity’s new system?

The goals were to modernize, to position ourselves for long term usage, to get onto a version that would significantly reduce or eliminate the security issues we were finding. Also to be effective with our enhancement and compliance updates that we need to make on a regular basis. We want to take advantage of what Insurity offers in their Policy Decisions Evolution platform that wasn't available in the version that we're using right now.

Are there unexpected or ancillary benefits that have emerged?

Going to a cloud hosting model will reduce our operating costs because we don't have to manage and maintain the servers. We also believe that a cloud hosting model provides a very secure foundation for operations. Security being, if not the number one concern for all organizations, certainly in the top three. We're no different. The responsibility for our customers' information is job one. We have to protect that.

Zurich as an organization does a very good job in its own data center, but we felt that moving to the cloud would give us equal safety and handle the burden of all of the security updates and other things that we had been doing in conjunction with Insurity. It would allow us to transfer that responsibility to our vendors. So it was a good outcome.

How is IT in the insurance industry different than in other industries where you worked?

I'm a little bit of an outlier in Zurich in that commercial insurance and insurance itself is pretty specialized knowledge and it's a pretty specialized set of skills to go into managing these systems. My background is more in enterprise systems like PeopleSoft and SAP. I bring different positives to the table in terms of some knowledge I've had with upgrading products and managing software development, life cycle type of activity. Zurich insures a lot of very interesting types of businesses. There's a wide variety of different types of products we offer to our customers. It's been a nice shift for me and Zurich's a great place to work, very employee-centric. It's been a good career change overall.

Running IT at Zurich, how did the company get through the pandemic?

I can remember the day when we all picked up our stuff and went offsite. Zurich did a really good job of having the tools at hand to foster that remote work environment. It went really well. We do have a number of team members in India. We have some Insurity team members in the Philippines. We're already geographically distributed. Prior to the pandemic, there was already a culture of distributed work teams. We hardly skipped a beat.

Most IT people are pretty familiar with having calls like this [referring to Google Meet, where he spoke to Digital Insurance]. I've been doing work with teams in India for 17 years now, so it didn't feel different, other than working in my home office. Zurich has done a really good job of supporting that. Our return to the office isn't rigid. We give flexibility to people to be able to work in the conditions that make the most sense. In my team, we still have a number of days that we work from home.

Are there other projects in store for you in the role there?

Zurich is a very forward looking organization with respect to their technology. We're modernizing a number of the systems that my team supports, whether it's an upgrade to Zspire or for our homegrown products to make sure that we have the right footprint and versions to sustain our platforms indefinitely. There's countless product refreshes going on, which are fairly significant efforts to update forms and rates and things of that sort. We're implementing new systems to take products from older technology to more modern, forward-thinking technology.

Zurich's very innovative and very aggressively looking at how they can digitize and offer more solutions to their customers. I'm just one of many people that are running large projects and Zspire is one of many systems that's being positioned for future growth and to make sure that we are doing the right things, number one from a security standpoint, and then number two from offering the proper type of functionality to our users.