Santam has moved its core insurance platform to the cloud, following 30 months of planning and testing of its Guidewire system.
The short-term insurer says the move makes it the first company in Africa to complete a full digital migration of its core insurance environment.
The migration involved moving the full production environment onto the Guidewire Cloud Platform.
It included transferring large policy and claims databases and re-architecting integrations with downstream systems to establish cloud-based security and recovery processes.
The move comes as the market for cloud services in insurance is expected to reach $32.2 billion by 2026, up from $16.6 billion in 2021, according to industry analysts.
This growth is underpinned by cloud computing's ability to accelerate product delivery and reduce time to market.
The Guidewire Cloud Platform unlocks functionality that is difficult and costly to achieve in traditional on-premises environments, says the insurer.
These features include rapid scalability during peak periods, advanced monitoring, and faster deployment of new features.
The move is fundamentally about future-proofing the business, says Sam Nkosi, chief information office of Santam.
He explains: “On premises infrastructure naturally becomes more expensive, less flexible and harder to scale over time. Cloud environments, by contrast, provide significantly higher resilience and recovery capabilities, while innovation cycles are much faster, providing a stronger foundation for digital, data and AI-driven capabilities.”
Nkosi continues: “Our teams now spend far less time managing hardware and infrastructure, and more time focusing on business improvements and customer value.
“Updates, maintenance and scaling are handled in a far more automated and predictable way, removing the need for costly, cumbersome and business-impacting upgrades, and allowing teams to collaborate more closely and respond faster to change.”
While the migration represents a major technological shift, the real impact will be felt by policyholders over time through more reliable systems and fewer disruptions, says the insurer.
Nkosi explains that the change is not about a new interface, but about better outcomes and faster processing of policies and claims.
“For customers, this change is not about a new interface, but about better outcomes.
"Policyholders can expect more reliable systems with fewer disruptions, faster processing of policies, changes and claims, quicker rollout of digital features, and improved consistency across channels such as brokers, call centres and online platforms. In other words, insurance that ‘just works’ more reliably and responsively.”
Nkosi notes that cloud infrastructure also fundamentally changes how resilience and system downtime are managed.
“Instead of relying on a single physical location, systems now run across multiple availability zones, with automated backups, built in recovery processes and failover mechanisms. This significantly reduces the risk of downtime and allows Santam to recover faster from unexpected events without impacting clients.”
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