Deliver Business Value Faster and Easier with Guidewire Cloud Infrastructure

In his blog “Cortina. Cloud Faster.”, Diego Devalle wrote that “skiing has officially become a part of Guidewire’s culture”. As an avid skier myself, I have to admit that I’m thrilled with this, too. There’s a parallel between modern skis and innovating with Guidewire Cloud: both are much faster and easier to use than in previous versions. What this means for Guidewire Cloud customers is they’ll be able to provide the right insurance to the right markets while increasing efficiency across the entire insurance lifecycle. In this blog, I’m going to focus on Guidewire Cloud Infrastructure:

This includes all of Guidewire’s purpose-built services for functions like provisioning, authentication, and property services, in addition to the underlying services powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other third parties.

In terms of how we’re helping customers go faster, there are two areas I’d like to highlight. First, we’ve driven provisioning time down to 15 minutes — a year ago, this could take up to 20 days. We accomplished this by automating the connections between different services across the platform. Second, we’ve expanded autoscaling across a number of services. Together, this means insurers will be able to get new innovations to market faster, and they’ll be able to scale with their policyholders’ needs in real time.

We’re also making it faster and easier for customers to get to Guidewire Cloud. For existing customers, we’ve optimized our CloudDirect offering with a data migration service to streamline the upgrade to Guidewire Cloud. We’ve also expanded Guidewire Cloud Platform (GWCP) to seven regions across four continents.

• North America: Three regions • Europe: Two regions • Australia: One region • Asia: One region

To make Guidewire Cloud easier to navigate, we’ve unveiled Guidewire Cloud Home. This is a single screen where Guidewire Cloud customers can go to access all of their cloud applications:

One application that’s especially important for Guidewire Cloud Infrastructure is Guidewire Cloud Console. Accessible from Guidewire Cloud Home, Guidewire Cloud Console is both a dashboard and a control panel for your cloud services:

We update the Guidewire Cloud Console every six weeks, so it’s improving at an even faster pace than our ski resort releases. This keeps the platform current, with no disruptions to our customers’ business applications. Most recently, we’ve enhanced the self-service tools for provisioning, deployment, user management, and logging. We’ve also improved secrets management and configuration of the CI/CD pipeline. We’ll add database backup and restore in the near future. All of these improvements will help Guidewire Cloud customers get new innovations to market faster so they grow their business and increase efficiency.

I’m also excited that we’re now making GWCP available to InsuranceNow customers. This means they’ll be able to benefit from the investments we’re making in Guidewire Cloud Infrastructure, Application Services, and Data and Analytics Services. Support for these customers will initially include auto-scaling and self-healing for improved performance and availability.

If you’d like more information about Guidewire Cloud Infrastructure or the Cortina release, check out our Cortina landing page or recordings from the May 2021 edition of Connections Reimagined. I also encourage you to keep an eye out for Ryan Smith’s upcoming blog post about Guidewire Application Services.

In the meantime, I’m going to try get one more day of Spring skiing at Squaw Valley in Lake Tahoe. After that, Mt. Dobson is just around the corner!