Category: Big Data

A “member enrollment” challenge in group employee benefits that is far deep-rooted than was thought to be, and how a “next-gen” solution can fix it.

Why member enrollment is an area of concern! Member enrollment is a crucial business function in healthcare and insurance group benefits and is directly associated with customer experience. It influences the experiences of all major external personas in the following way: Eligible employees start receiving coverage protection only when successfully enrolled in the carrier’s system Employers depend on the successful completion of the enrollment process for determining premium installments and accounting Plan administrators get paid only when the enrollment process is complete Brokers receive commission only on successful completion of the enrollment process as the way to determine employee participation...

Should we convert an existing Data Warehouse to Data Lake?

Should we convert an existing Data Warehouse to Data Lake? Often I get this question. I think this decision should be driven by rational evaluation of business needs & not because “all cool dudes are doing it”. DW has been around for a couple of decades. Historically, it’s been a gold-copy of operational data in structured format & the main BI enabler. Many of these DWs are built on legacy platforms on-premise with layers of interconnected data-marts evolving over years into complex “bus” constructs. Also, the business that used a DW for decades understands its data very well for analytic...

A serverless approach to relational data replication!

A serverless approach to relational data replication! I felt it challenging keeping cost & complexity at bay while designing real-time replication of data from operational RDBMSs, primarily due to the need for layering in multiple middlewares like CDCs, message brokers, message streams, etc. in different capacities which often result in a lot of plumbing. Also, the commercially available middleware platforms are not always free of compatibility issues, integration complexities & high costs. An alternate serverless option that I found handy is to leverage MySQL-compatible Amazon Aurora for such replications by leveraging its Stored Procedure that invokes Lambda functions. While it...