Research On The Application Of Cloud Computing In Insurance Industry

Since when China joined in the WTO, insurance industry, as one of the first industries opened to the world, has aroused wide concern of the social public. The rapid development of information technology provides opportunities for the insurance industry, promotes the rapid development of insurance business, and also speeds up the informatization of enterprises. Currently, there are a number of problems with the informatization building pattern in the insurance industry, such as the high cost, the demanding maintenance, and the inadequate utilization of much resources and facilities. The informationization building pattern is far from meeting the increasing demands of insurance industry in terms of individualization, diversification and flexibility. The input in informationization is not able to produce high investment returns.The rapid development of cloud computing technology brings an opportunity to solve these problems. Cloud computing, a newly-emerged computing pattern and service pattern, considers all IT resources as service. The enterprise management software, IT hardware and computation capability provided by the internet will effectively reduce the cost of IT software and hardware through the service pattern of cloud computing, and adapt to the demand of enterprises in different development stages in a flexible manner. It is able to virtualize the basic facilities scattered in different places and assemble these resources in the cloud computing platform, by which people may develop different application systems to meet the diversified demand of customers on the basis of the SOA.Based on a meticulous research into the theories and techniques of cloud computing. this paper proposes a new informationization building pattern---cloud computing building pattern in accordance with the status quo of insurance industry. This new pattern consists of three basic patterns, i.e. IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. The enterprise informationization building will use IT as service, and conduct analysis based on service provided by cloud computing. The analysis includes service types and skills and methods, etc. In the IaaS level, the insurance enterprise may adopt private cloud machine room hosted service. In the PaaS level, the software development of the insurance enterprise will mainly be contracted to outsourcing service providers, who will establish a cloud computing testing platform inside the enterprise. The configuration of test service resources will be done by establishing the test environment model. The wrong configuration caused by repeated handmade establishment of test environment and defects of test environment caused by bad model will be demolished; meanwhile, the virtualization technique may also be used to establish the test environment. In the SaaS level, the software will be provided to customers as a service, and the customers may directly use the application software without learning about the specific technical details. The paper applies the above cloud computing building pattern in Standard Life in the hope that it may provide reference for the informationization building in the insurance industry of China.