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Changing an industry from the inside

The insurance business isn’t known for moving fast. From product innovation to technology adoption, this highly regulated industry has something of a reputation for being slow to adopt new technology. But Socotra is out to change that.

The developer of the industry’s first app marketplace, Socotra aims to provide insurers with a modern, enterprise-grade technology that enables them to rapidly develop and distribute products that better serve their customers.

“Many insurance companies are still running their operations on mainframes, which are notoriously expensive and time-consuming when it comes to connecting with other systems,” says Nik Long, Socotra’s Director of Product and Technology for Marketplace. “For us, it isn't enough to have the most connectable software in the industry, we want to have the most connectable software of ANY industry.”

Grabbing hold of a rare opportunity

Socotra’s vision of building a comprehensive application marketplace and ecosystem for the insurance industry seemed like a near-impossible task.

The insurance industry is famously resistant to change and tightly regulated worldwide, so adoption of any new technology needs to demonstrate a significant advantage over the status quo. The faster we get something into the market, the faster we can demonstrate the value of our approach.

Unfortunately, Long knew that the tooling and manual processes typically used in platform development couldn’t and wouldn’t support such a lofty endeavor.

“Right away I knew we needed to automate as much as possible,” Long states. “It’s extremely challenging to deliver big ideas with a small team, but we have two advantages. Socotra is the only insurance core that a true app marketplace can be built on today and we’re motivated by the rare opportunity to set a new standard for the industry.”

Long says that traditionally, insurance platforms provide customers with code (“accelerators”) and leave it to them to hire a consultant in order to connect the apps to the ecosystem. It’s a slow, expensive, and often painful experience.

However, after evaluating various digital infrastructure and security automation solutions, Long and Socotra chose to create its industry-shaping marketplace with the HashiCorp Cloud Platform because of its simplicity, robust automation capabilities, and ability to scale along with the company’s growth.

“HashiCorp tools are cloud-native, flexible, and scalable so they can grow with us,” Long says. “Suddenly, what seemed impossible, became possible because we could completely eliminate the most time-consuming and costly aspects of building a cloud-first ecosystem while making it a seamless experience for customers — all without jeopardizing security, compliance, and regulations.”

Among the HashiCorp ecosystem — including Terraform Cloud, HCP Vault, Nomad, and Consul — Long says Terraform is the linchpin to the whole operation. From a single, standardized workflow, Terraform can automate infrastructure provisioning and vital downstream activities in other HashiCorp products throughout the company’s various cloud environments.

“The most impressive thing about Terraform is its ability to self-manage and federate policy,” Long says. “With a single manual step, we can configure it to automatically stand up new cloud infrastructure, define our service discovery actions in Consul, provision containers in Nomad, and automate secrets management in Vault from end to end.”

Socotra adopted the HashiCorp Cloud Platform to create the insurance industry’s first app marketplace. HashiCorp solutions help Socotra automate critical infrastructure provisioning and service orchestration, while also automating secrets management to enhance the protection of highly sensitive systems, applications, and data.