Category: Digital Transformation

Cloud Computing / Data Strategy / Digital Transformation / Modernizations / Strategy

What is the future of RDBMS?

Serverless philosophy came a long way & likely to be the default architecture paradigm of the future. Currently, there are heavy uses of “serverless” for websites, applications, APIs, workflows & CDNs. In contrast, serverless RDBMSs are still not so widely used. While there are offerings like AWS Aurora (for MySQL), there are concerns in terms of security, access control, transaction mgmt, etc. As a result, RDBMSs still mostly get deployed either as on-prem or in VPC private subnets. But such deployments fail to align well with serverless apps & front-ends? Should then lambda functions with infinite scalability be allowed to...

Artificial Intelligence / Big Data / Cloud Computing / Data Strategy / Digital Transformation / Insurance / Integrations / Leadership / Machine Learning / Modernizations / NOSQL / Strategy

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...

Digital Transformation / Strategy

Nine best practices for microservices deployments

What best practices do you follow in deploying microservices in AWS? Assume an AI/ML model needs to be deployed in AWS & exposed as an API endpoint. What are the best practices? Is any guardrail available? While not a standard procedure & not limited to these, here is what I follow at minimum when I deploy an app service, for example, a Python ML model in AWS. Please share your thoughts. 1. Ensuring the right VPC for network isolation 2. Containerized hosting of the app service in ECS cluster spun in private subnets for access control 3. ECS cluster spanning...

Digital Transformation / Insurance

Which 3 things make digital transformation the biggest concern for insurers, even more than the sluggish economy & low-interest rates?

Paper assets – Over decades, insurers accumulated paper assets that could stretch for miles. Most of those are confidential & must be archived for regulatory reasons. They require special storage & authorized access. Thus, managing these paper assets is cost-intensive & time-consuming which makes operations inefficient. At the same time, the digitization of paper assets of that scale is nearly impossible. Regulations – Insurers run in a highly regulated environment. There are stringent guardrails in trying new ideas, & restrictions in the use of PII, PCI, & PHI data. These limit capabilities in a lab environment which slows down innovations....

Digital Transformation / Strategy

What 4 things if not addressed can kill your microservices strategy?

Microservices provide freedom from the clutches of the “spaghetti monster” and lets us to the world of flexibility, scalability & agility, but they don’t come free. Here are 4 reasons why! 1. While microservices reduce the “impact” of IT changes through the separation of concerns they can increase the “frequency” of changes that can impact business in the absence of a right level of DevOps maturity, the severity of which rises exponentially as they grow in number. 2. Microservices are founded on the principles of “separation”. This means “isolation” is important in their management from people, process & technology standpoints....