Insurance companies are under more pressure than ever to innovate faster and stay competitive. This means carrier developer teams are being asked to create new features and applications to meet customer needs and market demands regularly. However, hybrid models, siloed teams, and varied tools for development and measurement can slow organizations down, create higher operational costs, and lead to inefficiencies. In fact, according to a report by project management company Atlassian, almost 70% of developers report that inefficiency costs them at least eight hours every week.
To help address these hurdles, insurers and other organizations are increasingly turning to internal developer platforms. Unfamiliar with internal developer platforms? They act as centralized hubs that enable teams to catalog, evaluate, and build services efficiently, leading to (among other benefits) faster time to market, better collaboration across teams, and enhanced data-driven insights.
While some insurers have already started leveraging these platforms to give their teams better agility, not every organization has made the move. Here’s a closer look at what internal developer platforms offer and how some insurers have used them to achieve faster, more flexible development pipelines.
What Are Internal Developer Platforms?
By consolidating developer access to the infrastructure, tools, and processes needed to build and maintain software applications, internal developer platforms streamline workflows and enable automation at scale. On top of this, they can be tailored to insurers’ specific business needs, alleviating some of the stress that comes with integrating industry-specific tools and partners into one platform. And because internal developer platforms are a one-stop-shop for an organization’s development teams, they encourage collaboration, removing silos between departments.
In 2019, for example, Allianz made a pivotal decision to move its core systems from the mainframe to a Linux-based operating system to prioritize having an agile, cloud-native application infrastructure. This shift, which was completed in spring 2022, has enabled the insurer to consistently provide its developers with real-time data access and information across the value chain displayed transparently on a dashboard. The move has enabled IT team members and business colleagues alike to gain better visibility across the organization as well as enhanced developers’ ability to innovate faster with the latest information and technology.
Outside the insurance industry, popular language-learning company Duolingo leveraged OpsLevel’s capabilities to not only improve its data entry for consolidation and better accuracy, but also to enable its developers to accelerate their processes through service creation templates. Rather than relying on its previous system of disparate microservices, leveraging a single source of truth and starting from the service creation templates has helped developers add services faster and in a standardized manner.
Whether an insurer is building a custom internal developer platform as part of a new architecture or working with an off-the-shelf solution, investing in developer enablement, automation, and standardization paves the way for long-term success in a competitive marketplace.
How to Successfully Implement an Internal Developer Platform
Implementing an internal developer platform is not just about adopting new technology — it requires careful planning, strategic alignment with business goals, and a focus on security and compliance.
Here are the key steps insurers should take to build and integrate an internal developer platform into their organization:
1. Define Your Objectives and Cloud Strategy
Before implementing an internal developer platform, insurers must clearly define their goals for cloud adoption and platform management. This involves aligning the platform’s capabilities with business priorities, such as faster policy processing, improved claims automation, or enhanced customer experiences.
Establishing foundational elements like account management and centralized networking is essential to ensure a scalable and secure infrastructure. Insurers should also implement traffic inspection mechanisms to monitor and control data flow across cloud environments, reducing security risks while maintaining performance.
2. Develop a Robust Security Posture
Security and compliance are paramount in the insurance industry, making it essential to build security in from the start. A well-structured internal developer platform should include centralized policy management to enforce security best practices and regulatory requirements.
Role-based access controls should be in place to ensure that only authorized users can access critical resources. And to further strengthen security, insurers need to integrate automated compliance checks and audit logging, ensuring continuous security monitoring and reducing the risk of breaches.
3. Establish Comprehensive Observability
To maintain resilient systems, insurers need complete visibility into their development and operational environments. This requires real-time monitoring to track application performance and infrastructure health, allowing teams to detect potential issues before they escalate.
Insurers should also implement automated alerting and incident management to streamline troubleshooting and resolution, reducing downtime and improving service continuity. Lastly, leveraging log aggregation and analytics provides deeper insights into system behavior, helping insurers optimize workflows and proactively address performance bottlenecks.
4. Launch a Self-Service Developer Portal
The key to a successful internal developer platform is making development and deployment processes accessible and frictionless. A self-service portal enables developers to independently provision infrastructure, manage continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and access security tools without unnecessary delays.
By streamlining these operations, insurers reduce their reliance on platform teams and allow engineers to focus on innovation. Automating workflows within the portal enhances efficiency, ensuring teams can quickly ship new applications while maintaining consistency and compliance across environments.
5. Keep Iterating Post-Implementation
Once implemented, the platform must be continuously optimized and scaled to meet evolving business and regulatory needs. Insurers should invest in developer training and clear documentation to drive adoption across teams.
Monitoring platform usage will help identify areas for improvement and expansion, ensuring the internal developer platform remains effective as business needs change. Lastly, iterating automation and security capabilities will help insurers stay ahead of emerging risks and industry standards.
By taking a strategic and phased approach, insurers can successfully integrate an internal developer platform into their organization to enhance efficiency, security, and innovation across their systems and workflows.
Future-Proofing Insurance Technology
As insurers navigate challenges like time to market, operational costs, security, and developer productivity, internal developer platforms have become essential. More than just a developer tool, they serve as a unified platform for multiple teams, enabling seamless collaboration and efficiency.
This plus their ability to streamline software delivery and help insurers scale, adopt emerging technologies, and enhance digital experiences make internal developer platforms an opportunity for insurers to not only keep up with the market but maybe even lead it.
Interested in learning more about how to transform your cloud infrastructure and prepare for the future of insurance? Check out all of ValueMomentum’s services for cloud platforms.
