Decisions in the Cloud

Many companies are thinking about ways to take advantage of cloud computing.  SulAmérica is turning those thoughts into action. As Brazil’s biggest independent insurance company, they needed a better way to connect with their 30,000 brokers throughout the continent in order to make more consistent, flexible underwriting decisions. SulAmérica will use FICO^® Blaze Advisor^® , hosted on Google’s cloud, to easily manage and change business rules while keeping hardware costs low.

This is a great example of the benefit of putting decision services in the cloud. The high volume transactions associated with decision services make the cloud ideal for keeping IT costs down while providing flexibility and capacity to handle spikes in volume. And in a world where companies can no longer wait months to deploy changes to their decision services, the cloud is a way to circumvent the IT backlog and get to market faster.

So what does it take to put decisions in the cloud?

• Cloud Flexibility – every cloud vendor has a different set of capabilities that are guaranteed to change over the next few years so you need a flexible set of choices that can adapt to the needs of your particular cloud. In addition, it is important to design your decision services so they can move freely between different providers and between in-cloud and on-premise.
• Decision Performance and Scalability – you need to be able to handle extremely high volumes of decisions and to maintain performance as the complexity of the logic evolves over time.
• Business User Control – to reap the greatest benefit from the cloud, you need to give the business experts a safe and effective environment for managing their own decisions without being dependent on IT.

SulAmerica is showing how companies can take advantage of evolving technology to deliver faster and better decisions to reduce risk, cut costs, and drive profitable growth.  You can read the full press release here.