Switching from an on-premise to cloud-based insurance document management system can be a major decision for an IT department—and an important step forward for businesses seeking to modernize their operations. For insurers, cloud hosting offers several significant benefits, like reducing IT costs. When businesses embrace the cloud, IT costs go down while the potential for innovation and the value of using the cloud goes up. In fact, McKinsey estimates the “value the cloud generates from enabling businesses to innovate is worth more than five times what is possible by simply reducing IT costs.”
Benefits of cloud document management for carriers
- Scalability: Compared with legacy hosting systems, a cloud-based document management system can more easily scale up or down as future needs require. Operating capacity can easily increase to match seasonal peaks without the need for additional hosting infrastructure, which is otherwise unnecessary at most times during the year. Best of all, hardware limitations do not have to constrain future decision-making around scaling.
- Security: Cloud-based insurance document management providers have leading-edge security measures in place to protect customer data, including encryption, data backups, and multi-factor authentication. The increase in data protection legislation such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) means it is no longer optional for organizations in these jurisdictions to follow strict security and compliance measures when accessing and storing customer data. An insurance document management system such as ImageRight streamlines compliance with these new and changing requirements.
- Accessibility: A cloud-based document management system can be accessed via an internet connection from anywhere, allowing for remote collaboration and increased productivity among employees.
- IT effectiveness: Enterprises that switch to cloud hosting report more effective deployment of their IT departments on larger strategic priorities. Technology teams can better focus on advancing business objectives when they are not constantly tending to infrastructure problems.
- Budget reallocation: A cloud-based document management system eliminates the need for expensive hardware and maintenance, and it also reduces high utility bills for server facilities. These savings can help offset other expenditures.
Upgrade from on-premise to cloud hosting
For the decreasing number of insurers where on-premises remains the norm, IT team members typically spend a significant amount of their time performing basic maintenance on physical hardware and server infrastructure. This requires ongoing training and increases onboarding time for new hires, limiting their capacity to take on more pressing issues. For these reasons, the majority of large carriers have already taken action to shift their IT budgets toward cloud hosting.
With Vertafore’s ImageRight solution for document and workflow management, now is the optimal time to upgrade to cloud-based insurance document management system. By shifting to the cloud, insurers can offload their hardware challenges and better engage their teams to focus on growing the business, not maintaining it.