It was this reality that prompted RBC Capital to note last year that 30% of the world’s data was being generated by healthcare. It also predicted it will increase by an annual compound growth rate of 36% by 2025.

Just as importantly, the ability to use this data is also inextricably linked to payers’ successful completion of crucial business outcomes. These include growing customer satisfaction by creating member delight, future proofing core platforms, achieving operational excellence by transforming business processes, creating an effective analytics and machine-learning data platform able to extract actionable insights, and creating systems that protect data and inform stakeholders when threats are imminent.


Fortunately, the IT infrastructure used by most payers was created to address these imperatives. Unfortunately, in most cases it is no longer sufficient.

Core networks, mainframe systems and on-premises data centers are no longer up to the task
Most payers rely on platforms that reflect decades old data management strategies, with monolithic mainframe systems still common. These are often tied to data warehousing solutions, often in numerous environments, later modernized with Hadoop-based infrastructure to best make use of what was then the most powerful open-source big data solution.

Such systems were effective to address pivotal challenges at the time. Not only did they make it possible to effectively manage core functions like member services, claims and finance, but they also empowered payers to create and deploy operational dashboards and reports.

Today, several converging trends are pushing these assets to their limits. Portals for members and providers are generating more data than ever, payers are challenged to be nimbler, and IT teams are struggling to maintain and manage on-premises systems – including the networks that are increasingly too expensive to use when storing data at scale. Simultaneously, the demand for compute power continues to increase in the face of powerful new applications.

The cloud changes everything
The attributes of the cloud – its elasticity and almost limitless capacity offered at razor-thin margins, the ability to tap unprecedented compute power, and the inherent redundancy it delivers through a software-defined approach make it ideal for payers. With the cloud, payers can completely decouple storage and compute resources while increasing automation.

Now they can also conceptualize, create and deploy applications faster than ever before – all while consolidating data enterprise-wide in a one location where it can be cleaned, analyzed and parsed with unprecedented ease on infrastructure that costs far less to operate, maintain and safeguard.

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