The insurance industry is continuously looking for the simplest,most efficient method of providing consumers with the best service,while at the same time trying to reduce overall operating expenses.While insurance providers explore the right options for theirbusinesses, one thing is certain: Cloud-based environments arelow-risk solutions that enable applications to increase businessvalue. Research has shown that running desktop applications in thecloud can be attractive because it reduces complexity and increasessecurity.

Aside from the insurance industry, other financial servicesinstitutions struggle to find a business structure that providesthe desired flexibility and market savings necessary to provideexcellent customer service. However, with the help of cloudcomputing and unified communications, these challenges are beingovercome. Due to recent success and proven low-risk functionality,insurers are gradually adopting cloud solutions to help guidebusiness operations and initiatives. In fact, Gartner predicts that the cloud systeminfrastructure market will grow by 47.8% through 2015.

Cloud computing is changing the way organizations store andaccess large applications and data. Cloud capabilities provide away to increase capacity or add capabilities quickly without havingto invest in costly infrastructures or training new personnel.Cloud computing also extends an organization's existing ITcapabilities by allowing for subscription or pay-per-useservices.

Insurers' Cloud ComputingApplications
Insurers can achieve businessflexibility through a traditional non-cloud-basedtransition. Insurers are likely to spend millions of dollarsupfront on on-premise hardware for the new infrastructure. Then,they must work around application development, which can turn intoa lengthy customization and implementation process.

Through internal cloud computing, computingapplications, platforms and infrastructure are delivered as abundle of services to users within a private business. One of thegreatest benefits that internal cloud-based computing providesinsurers is the ability to create a virtual server easily anddeploy business-user-configurable cloud software solutions quickly.Virtualization allows that software or hardware to run more thanone application at a time, so as a result, insurers can launch newproducts and services faster than ever before.

Insurers also can develop an external cloudcomputing integration model or Software as a Service(SaaS). Instead of buying servers and procuring space in the datacenter, cloud computing increases business value because it can beturned on the next day. It removes some upfront coststhat can be risky to insurers by allowing for pay-per-use thatenables the agility and flexibility that insurers want. One of thebiggest selling points for external cloud computing is thepotential to reduce IT support costs by outsourcing hardware andsoftware maintenance and support to the SaaS provider.

How can you tell if your organization is ready for cloud-basedtechnology solutions? It's important that insurers rationalizeapplications and create their own cloud-based strategies andcapabilities that allow for taking advantage of private cloudwithin an organization, public cloud and hybrid cloud models.Unified computing systems (UCS) and servers unify computing,networking, management, virtualization and storage access into asingle integrated architecture. This unique architecture enablesend-to-end server visibility, management, and control in both baremetal and virtual environments, and facilitates the move to cloudcomputing and IT-as-a-service with fabric-based infrastructure.