Milliman – Expanding the Integrate™ Cloud Solution with BI and Reporting in the Cloud
A former colleague and personal friend, Paul Maher - CTO of Integrate & MG-ALFA at Milliman has been working extensively on expanding their solution with BI and Reporting on Azure. Milliman is a great example of a company utilizing Cloud in a “BIG” way. Integrate, an end-to-end, revolutionary cloud-based system for the life insurance market, has been built on the Microsoft Azure platform and reimagines the relationships between people, process and technology. Integrate clients are able to run large actuarial jobs on-demand year round, benefiting from the Azure platform’s scale and extensibility in a pay-as-you-go business model.
In this post, you will hear from Paul Maher, CTO - Integrate & MG-ALFA at Milliman, on the work his team are doing as they expand Integrate to include BI and reporting in the Cloud.
“In 2014, we expanded Integrate to include a new product called Data Management. Data Management provides input data preparation and management, actuarial reporting, and extraction of actuarial data to support the financial reporting process.
Data Preparation, Processing, and Reporting
Integrate Data Management is built using Azure Data Factory and Azure HDInsight, a Hadoop-based cloud service, used to fulfill data preparation and processing requirements. We are also evolving the reporting capabilities of Integrate to provide a feature-rich and immersive experience for our clients. For example, we are evaluating Microsoft Office 365 and Power BI for new reporting functionality.
Azure Data Factory is a cloud service that orchestrates, manages, and monitors the integration and transformation of structured and unstructured data from on-premises and cloud sources at scale. By using Azure Data Factory, we were able to meet our go-to-market plans by providing a rich and reliable platform to manage Azure HDInsight jobs. Without this new integration, we would have had to build the service itself at great time and expense.
Data Management is leveraging Azure Data Factory to create workflows or pipelines that integrate and transform data from multiple sources for reporting. Integrate Data Management sends structured and unstructured input data through Azure Data Factory to a compute grid that is distributed across multiple Azure data centers. This provides high levels of scalability and redundancy. Integrate Data Management also ensures strong security and privacy.
Simplifying data input was a major goal of Integrate Data Management, because pulling multiple types of data together from diverse sources across the enterprise could be time-consuming and challenging. After we run our data model in the cloud, it generates terabytes of information. Our clients get great value from the aggregation of the data, so we needed to make it more manageable and accessible.
Turning Big Data into Big Insights
Clients create complex custom Pig scripts (Hadoop query language) to manipulate and shape data. The scripts are then executed by Azure Data Factory workflows and run on Azure HDInsight. Clients can use their favorite reporting tools to work with the new, smaller data sets. By working quickly and easily with large volumes of data from multiple sources, our clients gain real-time insight into their financial data.
We are already working on enhancements that will further automate and improve actuarial workflows, as well as evolving their cloud reporting capabilities.
Azure Data Factory and HDInsight has provided the capabilities needed to support data management, data manipulation, and reporting requirements for our clients. Actuaries should be focused on analyzing results and creating value for the company, not worrying about massaging data and managing reporting systems. Now, actuaries spend less time managing data, and more time on valuable projects such as better understanding the risks and evaluating management actions to best manage them”.
For further information, please use the following resources:
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Milliman
website
[Integrate<br>website](https://www.integrate-solutions.com/?utm_source=milliman&utm_medium=website&utm_content=hp-ad&utm_campaign=integrate)
Paul Maher began his career at a small actuarial firm in the U.K., building pension software, and transitioned to IT roles and leadership positions at Microsoft, KPMG, and others prior to joining Milliman in 2013. He has a passion for building software solutions that help solve challenging business problems. Contact Paul at LinkedIn.