In increasing numbers, enterprises around the globe are adding public clouds to their technology portfolios. According to Forrester, adoption of public clouds by all types of business enterprises will cross over the 36 percent mark this year. Gartner research shows public cloud services grew more than 17 percent worldwide in 2014 to $152 billion and will grow 16 percent in 2015 to $177 billion. Gartner also predicts total spending on public cloud services for all segments will reach $282 billion through 2018. This means that cloud services are becoming the bulk of new IT spend by 2016.
Executive Summary
Property/casualty insurers have started getting their feet wet with moves to cloud computing for noncore office and support service functions. But they won't realize the full benefits until they start moving mission-critical workloads to a cloud environment, according to Aviv Cohen and Meryl Golden of Earnix, who outline the benefits and address concerns about privacy and security.The insurance industry, by its very nature, is heavily regulated and sensitive to risk. Though it has been a user of IT and business process outsourcing and offshoring for quite a while, the industry has been perhaps slightly more reticent than other industries to embrace public cloud computing, at least initially. But this is changing—and fast. Nowadays, the potential of cloud computing no longer is a topic of debate in the insurance industry, and adoption of cloud services is beginning to ramp up.
