The Cloud Advantage: Guidewire Cloud Platform

A 2024 ICTA nomination

Toronto, ON (Feb. 7, 2024) – Each insurer serves its customers uniquely. That’s why Guidewire offers a platform that enables each customer to keep its unique differentiation while we keep the service up to date as a part of the subscription agreement.

Guidewire Cloud Platform (GWCP) is the technical architecture that powers Guidewire’s applications in the cloud. It provides insurers with the tools they need to develop, provision, deploy, and run Guidewire applications. This increases business agility to drive profitable growth, accelerates development, and reduces IT complexity and extends to digital, data, and analytics applications. Moreover, the underlying architecture of GWCP is grounded in best practices learned from successfully delivering P&C solutions over the last two decades. There are three releases each year and new features are toggled off by default so that you can decide when you want to introduce them to your business. In addition to production and pre-production environments, subscriptions to GWCP include development environments that can be set up automatically and on demand. When developers need a new environment, it can be created with the push of a button.

With GWCP, all Guidewire products are now available as cloud services. GWCP is powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and uses more than 30 web services including Amazon Aurora. Guidewire is an Amazon Partner Network (APN) Advanced Technology Partner and has achieved AWS Financial Services Competency. Competency Partners have industry expertise, solutions that align with AWS architectural best practices, and staff with AWS certifications. As the world’s leading cloud platform, AWS complies with more than 60 standards, regulations, and national frameworks. AWS recently recognized Guidewire as a recipient of a 2023 Geo and Global AWS Partner Award as Industry Partner of the Year – Financial Services – Global, from among top AWS Partners with the AWS Financial Services Competency. The 2023 AWS Partner Awards recognize partners whose business models continue to evolve and thrive on AWS as they work with customers and honor leaders around the globe playing a key role in helping customers drive innovation and build solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

GWCP uses a hybrid cloud tenancy model where the InsuranceSuite core is deployed in single-tenant instances for each customer. Core single-tenant applications are encapsulated with system, process, and experience APIs so that integrations are robust and changes in one system can be independent of all other systems. Testing is automated and we provide a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline so updates can be pushed to production much faster than in traditional environments. Guidewire Cloud Console provides an intuitive way for insurers to manage source code, CI/CD, environments, secrets, users, billing, and auditing.

This is complemented by multi-tenant cloud services (rating, quoting, rules, provisioning, product models, etc.) that provide essential P&C functional capabilities, and those capabilities can be shared by many customers. These services can be always on as well as updated whenever subscribers want — without down time or waiting for a maintenance window. The architecture ensures each customer’s core data is maintained in a single tenancy environment, while still making the data available to use within the hybrid tenancy GWCP ecosystem. This design ensures security, scalability, and performance. In tandem, these single-tenant core applications interact with multi-tenant cloud services to fulfill functional needs, optimize resource utilization, and minimize cost.

Security at Guidewire operates not only at this technical level, but also operationally by implementing controls throughout every team and process. As a result, GWCP has attained industry best-practice compliance audits, including SOC1, SOC2, ISO 27001, and ISO 27701. Guidewire’s commitment to security extends to working across the SaaS industry through its founding membership of the IT-ISAC Critical SaaS Special Interest Group. Joining leaders in the cloud, the body provides a forum for SaaS companies to collaborate on a collective defense strategy to improve the security and operational resiliency of their services and share intelligence information with the industry at large. This collective approach to security in the cloud means that individual IT departments no longer have to navigate the complexities of security alone.

Alberta Motor Association (AMA) implemented Guidewire InsuranceSuite on GWCP to power their core business, simplify IT operations, adapt quickly to changing market demands, and keep pace with customer expectations. The company migrated from an on-premise instance of Guidewire to GWCP to accelerate their organization-wide transformation agenda. By leveraging GWCP, AMA is now able to rapidly leverage best-in-class capabilities embedded in the Guidewire InsuranceSuite platform that will simplify their insurance practice and enable member self-service. It will also enable them to fully leverage DataHub as its enterprise-wide data management system, and Explore to gather and curate data from Guidewire InsuranceSuite in near-real time, then visualize that data to empower teams to make informed business decisions. The company finished the implementation of all Guidewire products across all lines of business on January 5, 2023.

Business Value

Having only launched at the beginning of 2023, benefits realization is still underway but AMA is immediately seeing opportunities for returns in claims (streamlining and automating), billing (simplification and improved efficiency) and underwriting (product development. Tangible benefits since launch have included:

• Increased go-to-market timeline with new telematics product launch in Q1 2024
• Upgrade to new GWCP releases in days or weeks, as opposed to multiple months or even years
• Increased efficiency in deploying digital features

About Guidewire Software

Guidewire (NYSE: GWRE) is the platform P&C insurers trust to engage, innovate, and grow efficiently. We combine digital, core, analytics, and machine learning to deliver our platform as a cloud service. More than 540 insurers in 40 countries, from new ventures to the largest and most complex in the world, run on Guidewire.

As a partner to our customers, we continually evolve to enable their success. We are proud of our unparalleled implementation track record, with 1,600+ successful projects, supported by the largest R&D team and partner ecosystem in the industry. Our marketplace provides hundreds of applications that accelerate integration, localization, and innovation. For more information, please visit www.guidewire.com.

SOURCE: Guidewire Software