Why Oracle Cloud has the ability to provide PaaS services

With a history spanning almost 140 years, Charles Taylor provides insurance solutions with a unique breadth – offering technical expertise and global reach alongside award-winning solutions.

Charles Taylor’s strong partnerships and long-term client relationships span multiple value-creating solutions, with the brand handling claims from end-to-end, establishing and managing insurers, and implementing technology solutions the world over.

Charles Taylor’s constant strive for excellence is propelled forward through use of an array of Oracle Cloud systems that have been in place for the last 5-6  years – as Vikas Sharma, Global Head of INSIS CoE, explains.

‘A natural choice’

“It was a natural choice for us to try Oracle Cloud products since our application was developed in oracle software, so we moved into OCI. One of the main benefits of OCI was providing PaaS services. So we utilised PaaS services and deployed the database on DBAS services.”

Comparing OCI Autonomous Database to a self-driving car, Sharma praised its ability to do its own patching -– whether that be security patching, security detection or identifying vulnerabilities. 

“It basically gives us the added benefit of using an autonomous database underneath our applications,” he says.

And there’s a financial benefit, as well.

Fast delivery

“I always use this phrase: time is money,” says Sharma. “The first and foremost benefit that we get is it helps us to deliver our solution in first time-to-market – if we deliver faster to our clients, the clients can make money by selling more policies. So that's the first and basic mantra for us.

“With this first-time-to-market, with all the underlying services which OCI provides, we can spin up servers, provision services on the click of a button. It's not exactly like that, but still, the time for server building and infrastructure building – which used to take many days, sometimes many months – has reduced a lot. And that eventually reduces a lot of our cost, which benefits our customers.”

Security and safeguarding data

With data protection and security of the utmost importance to the business, Sharma explains that Oracle’s services, when used together, completely safeguard information at all levels. 

“Our applications hold a lot of personal, very sensitive data, so security is paramount. 

“We use multiple OCI security products to completely safeguard at the tenancy level. We use Oracle Cloud Guard, which is one of the products that comes from OCI, to secure at the tenant level. Then we utilise other services from OCI, like DataSafe, specifically, to find out any kind of vulnerabilities at the database level.

“All our servers are in a private subnet so they are completely secured. And we utilise some of the services security list type of services, rules services from OCI, to secure our applications.”

And, in turn, Charles Taylor’s solutions have become more agile: “We can develop different things with multiple teams in parallel,” he explains.

“Integration services are developed on Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC), which is part of one of the components of OCI. More agile development practices are adopted on this type of solution. And that eventually makes our whole solution agile, fostering time to market.”

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