Big Data

Why Big Data Could Also Mean Big Security Breaches for Insurance Companies

Friday, September 2, 2016

Quadrant Information Services is warning that digitization is a two-edged sword: with increased capability comes an increased danger of expensive—and possibly actionable—data security breaches.

Big Data has been one of the largest growing developments for insurance. Car insurance companies, for instance, used to price policies based on only 10 to 20 rate bearing factors alone (age, gender, ZIP code, driving record, etc.). But with recent advances like telematics and wearable technology, however, companies are now able to gather a much larger database with a higher level of granularity for those rate bearing factors—credit scores, fraud data, reputational data, etc.—driving the number of relevant variables into the thousands. Hence the term, Big Data.

Nonetheless, the growth of Big Data has undeniably led to certain better business practices: companies that have integrated Big Data and analytics tools have proven more competitive through implementing greater efficiency, meeting the needs of customers, and saving money by predicting the behavior of insureds and thereby providing better service.

“This access to information is growing larger each day as technology offers more and more ways to assess risk, but it has also increased certain risks insurance carriers. Because of the extreme growth in access to data, carriers need a way to make sense of the information, a job that has become more and more complex for developers,” says Michael Macauley, CEO of Quadrant Information Services.

What all this means is that progress in big data and progress in security must go hand-in-hand. “It’s not enough to just put in firewalls; to create a data environment that can securely maintain this type of sensitive information, the industry needs to reshape the way it thinks about itself. We need to move—and quickly—to a truly security-centric business model.”