Generali China Life Insurance Simplifies Data Management and Compliance with Hitachi Content Platform

Overview

Challenge

• The company’s legacy content management system for image data lacked security and data protection.

Solution

• Hitachi Content Platform centralizes image files, simplifying management and data accessibility.

Outcome

• Customer-facing staff can access image data six to 10 times faster.
• Secure, long-term data storage minimizes the risk of data loss.
• Better data protection simplifies compliance.
• Supports data analytics in the future.

Challenge

Simplifying Management of Insurance Documents

Founded in 2002, Generali China Life Insurance Co., Ltd was jointly set up by China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and Assicurazioni Generali. It was the first joint venture insurance company between a domestic Chinese company and a foreign company since China joined the World Trade Organization. Generali China Life Insurance’s customer-first approach, efficiency and quality of claims services has kept the company among the top players in the industry.

As an insurer, the firm has high volumes of image files to manage, including insurance polices and identification documents. This data must be managed effectively for Generali China Life Insurance to maintain efficiency and customer service levels. 

The firm was using a traditional content management software with its file systems to store its image data, but this approach created several challenges around data management and operations. For example, the data was distributed across multiple file systems, which resulted in excessive space consumption and cumbersome management, and the platform lacked adequate security against viruses.

Backup and disaster recovery were also problematic, with backups often failing, limited protection against accidental deletions and no cross-site protection of the company’s data. As well as impacting day-to-day operations, these factors meant the company struggled to fulfil its compliance requirements.

Solution

Unifying Data Management with Hitachi Content Platform

To help unify data management, improve security and safeguard compliance, Generali China Life Insurance turned to Hitachi Vantara.

The Hitachi Vantara team established a new image platform and resource pool for the company based on Hitachi Content Platform. The object storage system simplifies management of Generali China Life Insurance’s unstructured data across core business functions, including group insurance, mobile applications and call centers.

The solution centralizes data allocation and search based on custom metadata and supports high-speed online operations, which will help the company fulfil its data analysis needs. The self-service functions provided by the platform greatly simplify data operations, including storage expansion, data transfer, mount point maintenance and storage backups.

Outcome

Faster Access to Data and Simplified Compliance

With its resource pool framework, the new file storage system offers greater scalability and easier management, improving the level of support for business operations.

Centralized data search and retrieval mean the company is no longer reliant on connecting different applications. As a result, customer-facing staff can now access image files from six to 10 times faster than before and business analysts can perform analytics more easily.

With active-active disaster recovery incorporated in the Hitachi Content Platform configuration, Generali China Life Insurance can safeguard its data without concerns about data loss or platform reliability. As well as avoiding the additional time and costs associated with offsite backups, the company can simplify compliance with regulatory requirements.