A pioneer in the insurance comparison industry, today, Confused.com serves millions of consumers a year, helping them find the best prices to protect the things they love, power their homes and finance big purchases. At a time of rising living costs and economic uncertainty, consumers are increasingly seeking informed, trusted advice that enables them to make confident financial decisions. According to Mintel, 73% of UK adults have used a financial comparison website within the past year as they strive to find the best deals on financial products quickly and easily.

In such an aggressive and fast-moving sector, Confused.com must continually deliver a superior customer experience to maintain its competitive edge. This relies on understanding exactly what customers need and why, to ease anxiety so often associated with financial decisions. Being truly customer-centric is reliant on optimising data, as Nick Sharp, director of data and technology, Confused.com, explains: “Delivering a seamless customer journey, enabling real-time interactions, personalised experiences, and offering a range of tooling beyond the price comparison itself is all about being data-led. It’s about making decisions based on data insights.”

Confused.com’s traditional in-house data framework was frustrating this ambition. “When you have an on-premises infrastructure and simple integrations, you are dealing with silos,” says Sharp. “We wanted to bring that together to deliver a more cohesive customer journey. Making financial decisions can be overwhelming – our aim is to reduce that burden as much as possible.”

Working with a trusted partner

This need prompted the company to seek help from long-term partner Microsoft, which also works with many of Confused.com’s partners, giving it peace of mind that the technology company understood how it wanted to enhance customers’ experience. Confused.com chose to migrate to Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, a solution that enables it to manage and store its data securely, as well as giving it access to multiple applications, services and tools. “Microsoft’s maturity and range of assets made it appealing,” says Sharp. “The cost element was important too, as well as the huge support offered by Microsoft, which made it a very easy six-month migration.”

The migration to Azure, and becoming cloud native, has initiated a culture shift at Confused.com, putting technology at the forefront of the business and allowing it to innovate and challenge the market. “It focused minds on how technology could enable us to go beyond delivering the basic service and actually scale up what we were doing, helping us to derive greater insight and make a bigger difference to customers,” says Sharp. “It has empowered us to position ourselves as thought leaders, and that mindset is driving success.”

Considering Confused.com’s panel of partners was key to the decision. The company’s motor panel alone currently has more than 150 providers, and the numerous data feeds between customers and partners need to be robust and fast. “That was a driving factor for choosing Azure, as well as the ability to experiment, and scale,” says Sharp. “It was also about leveraging cloud technology and Azure’s out-of-the-box and customisable solutions.”

As Sharp says: “If we get the right message to the right customer at the right time, they are so much more likely to buy.” It was this need to deliver exactly what the customer is looking for at any given moment that also attracted Confused.com to Azure. Its generative AI enables companies to quickly build intelligent apps and scale them, training them to work with its customer data. “That is really where we’re seeing the uplift,” says Sharp.

For Confused.com, the technology has supercharged its marketing, improving spend by 10% through data enrichment and personalised offers and recommendations. “That relevance to customers shows we’re getting things right.”

Sharp adds that the integration of AI aligns with the company’s commitment to being a customer champion. “By leveraging AI for personalised services and gaining insights into customer needs, we can continue disrupting the insurance industry for the benefit of our customers.”

After all, people visit Confused.com seeking advice and reassurance. “For example, can we make any recommendations based on the information a customer has provided? If they are actively telling us they are interested in a product, or if there are any nuances we can respond to, we can be extra helpful,” says Sharp. “It allows us to anticipate what customers need and potentially save them even more time and money by alerting them to the most relevant product at the right time and at competitive prices.”

A key part of elevating technology to a more central role was using Azure’s AI capability to automate, freeing employees from repetitive tasks to focus on what Sharp describes as “the more gnarly stuff”. He says: “We can tackle the problems that haven’t been solved for customers – that’s where we can really add value – making that content relevant and personalised, and unearthing insights.”

Sharp adds that the impact of Azure goes beyond the company’s technologists. “All of our employees benefit from AI – ultimately it helps them to do their job better, spending more time helping customers to save money, and adding greater value.”

While use of Azure’s AI tools doesn’t remove the need for human input, Sharp says it is hugely valuable for generating ideas and starting conversations, as well as improving efficiencies. “It allows us to worry less about the infrastructure provisioning and scaling because that is all taken care of. Both AI and the cloud keep us operating at speed and meeting customer demand – that is where it matters and where we want our team spending their time.”

Reaping measurable benefits in the cloud

Since implementing Azure, Confused.com has reduced its analytics lead time by 50%, thanks to improved availability, speed, and richness of data, which is driving informed decisions. This benefits customers directly. “Customers rely on us for timely data products and services, they are not just simply getting a price,” says Sharp. “We are looking at the full customer journey, identifying friction points and experimenting and addressing them quickly, and we are able to swiftly respond to customer feedback.”

The company’s ceaseless drive to add value to customers has also been realised by Azure, allowing the company to introduce cashback and rewards, which are customised incentives rooted in data. “We are now able to give much more back to customers and make sure the experience is optimum,” says Sharp. “That additional capability has been enabled by our migration to Azure.”

Confused.com has big plans to continue building on its partnership with Microsoft and its success with Azure, and Sharp says it will carry on leveraging Microsoft’s latest off-the-shelf components and solutions to solve problems. “It’s a gamechanger knowing we don’t have to build everything ourselves or find our own solutions. We can tap into the expertise of a partner that truly understands our industry.”

He adds that the “ultimate dream” is simplification of the customer journey: “The more we can remove the friction points, the closer we can get to automatic switching. It’s great from a technology stance but it’s also great from a customer stance too. With so many people feeling the pinch at the moment, where people spend their money is important. So for us, saving people time, money and allowing them to make confident decisions, at no cost to them, is now more important than ever.”

Azure’s cloud and AI capabilities are playing a key role in ensuring that Confused.com remains dominant in a fierce market. “It is amazing being fully cloud native, and AI promises to be a very exciting next chapter,” says Sharp.

Read the report: Latest Trends in Cloud Migration and Modernisation

Explore the Microsoft UK AI Hub

Non-independent content produced as part of a commercial deal with Guardian Labs.

Header photograph: Gareth Iwan Jones/The Guardian

The post Staying in the fast lane: how Confused.com is leveraging AI and cloud technology to improve customer experiences appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Yet those that have taken the transformation leap can now stand as exemplars to newcomers. Their innovation has prompted the creation of many media-specific tools and services in the cloud which are now tried, tested and good to go.

In its new report, The Cloud for Media, the Digital Production Partnership (DPP) examines the practical benefits of the cloud for media companies and software vendors to the industry. It guides companies through cloud technology, strategy, migration, economics, and the skills and governance they’ll need to make transformation a success.

So what are the advantages of migrating media workflows to the cloud? What kind of changes do you need to prepare for? And what are the key takeaways from this report?

Benefits of the cloud

To leverage the full potential of cloud technology, media companies will need to commit to a new business strategy. That’s because migration changes existing business practices and relationships. To carry these changes through, your finance, technology and operational teams really need to be fully behind them.

In theory, this shouldn’t be controversial. The cloud will enable them to simplify processes, cut costs, and be more productive through being able to automate tedious tasks. Meanwhile, it can also free the wider business to adapt, experiment and innovate.

Let’s look at five more industry-specific benefits.

1. Collaborative production

The cloud enables more collaborative workflows, especially in content production. Many producers have successfully adopted Software as a Service (SaaS) tools such as collaborative document editing, file storage and resource planning. With very little training, they can quickly benefit from an excellent user experience.

2. Secure remote work

The cloud’s role in enabling remote and mobile working – supported by premium collaboration tools – is well known. Powerful cloud security solutions will also help protect your employees’ applications, data and devices. For example, single sign-on and multi-factor authentication (MFA) free staff to securely access their tools and resources whenever they need them. From anywhere.

3. Agile content delivery

With cloud-based workflows, you can speed up the supply chain. That’s because, once content is in the cloud, both software and people can access it directly, without a series of distributions. This can be especially useful for news broadcasting and live sports, in which breaking news or a winning goal can be shared with all distribution channels in near-real time. Better still, you could even look to automate the process.

4. Global distribution

A lot of large OTT platforms are run in the cloud, serving video to viewers using content delivery networks (CDNs). If you’re dealing with multiple regions, demand can be unpredictable. But the cloud allows you to scale delivery, without over-provisioning, to match changing demand. You can also use it to deliver live, broadcast-grade content and channels online (as several providers do for major sports).

5. Broadcast

Cloud-based channel playout and linear channel origination is finally on the rise. Protocols like RIST, SRT, and Zixi, combined with gradually improving connectivity and bandwidth, have enabled live streams to be transported into, around and out of the cloud. A note of caution: connectivity remains an area for attention.

Three practical tips for cloud migration

Each organisation will have its own migration journey, dictated by its individual business and customer needs. But the report highlights three key takeaways that will apply for all media companies.

1. Engage your whole organisation

First, get your CFO on-side. You’ll need their support, because the cloud uses an OpEx rather than a CapEx model. Next, work with the business to rethink workflows – don’t just migrate them to the cloud. Finally, to build support on your journey, regularly communicate the end to end strategy and provide training so your teams have the right skills to work alongside the latest technology.

2. Go ‘cloud native’

In other words, create solutions that exploit the cloud’s capabilities. That means taking advantage of its scalability, agility, resilience, performance and cost-effectiveness. Make sure your solutions are also built with security in mind. Consider factors like identity, access management, and encryption.

3. Commit to the process

Define a strategy and plan, and get going. Break your migration journey into manageable steps by migrating individual business areas or workflows one at a time. Move whole workflows to avoid migrating content in and out of the cloud too often (which adds cost and time to the process).

A practical way to learn about technology is to get hands-on with it – perhaps with a straightforward use case. The cost of experimenting is low, so why not try building a component that takes advantage of cloud capabilities, then tracking its performance and fine-tuning it? Or build a different component. Either way, it’s time to seize the day.

Find out more

Download the report: The Cloud for Media

Discover more: Azure Media Services’ new AI-powered innovation

Read about NBA and Microsoft’s new partnership: Redefining and personalising the fan experience

Join the conversation at Envision

Digital technology is changing not just how organisations operate but how leaders lead. Join us at Envision, where executives across industries come together to discuss the challenges and opportunities in this era of digital disruption. You’ll hear diverse perspectives from a worldwide audience and gain fresh insights you can apply immediately in your organisation.

Connect with leaders across industries to get relevant insights on leadership in the digital era.

About the author

As a lead spokesperson for innovation within the media industry, Stuart has played both sides of the fence having started his career as a BBC Journalist before moving into a number of roles in media production. From here the pull of technology innovation took him into development and R&D, then corporate strategic management and change consultancy for some of the biggest media brands around the globe.

Over the last 20+ years, Stuart has helped deliver major business transformation having held significant change roles at companies ranging from the BBC, Endemol Shine Group, to Sony.

Passionate about the transformation technology can bring, Stuart is now an Industry Lead for Media and Telecommunications within Microsoft, where he relishes any opportunity to offer his entrepreneurial spirit and natural storytelling ability to challenge organisations to ‘refocus the lens’ in order to create a successful impact through the adoption of innovation.

The post 5 benefits of cloud technology for media companies and how to migrate appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

For hospitals, it seems ‘move to the cloud’ isn’t quite as straight forward as everyone at first thought. And, for some, this has caused some confusion and decision paralysis. What’s needed are practical steps detailing how hospital leadership teams can begin moving patient and administrative data to the cloud and leveraging the benefits that the cloud offers.

In terms of technological advancement, healthcare is often at the cutting edge. Just consider genome sequencing or 4D foetal ultrasounds. In contrast, progress and investment in healthcare IT and infrastructure often lags behind other industries. Cloud solutions are a perfect example; healthcare has been one of the last bastions resisting the transition. Until now.

The challenges: What’s been holding back cloud adoption in healthcare?

Security and privacy

Security and privacy have always been one of the big objections that healthcare organisations put forward. However, the success and relative safety around online banking and shopping has meant privacy concerns around the online storage of medical records are fading. Today’s cloud providers employ state-of-the-art military-grade protection to keep data secure; technology likely beyond the reach of a typical hospital.

Data location and ownership

Data location and ownership was another challenge. While there are stringent rules around the use of the public cloud for healthcare data, regulations prohibiting its use have gradually been relaxed. Now, we face an open market where healthcare providers have choices as to where and how they manage their data online.

Funding models

Funding models are still a big hurdle, and hospitals continue to work on ways by which cloud technologies can be more easily procured. At a recent UK healthcare conference, one NHS Trust spokesperson declared that their IT policy mandated a ‘cloud-first’ strategy, yet the procurement department would not readily approve cloud purchases. A discussion then followed about ‘Capex v Opex’ and ‘VAT v no VAT’ that created an impasse. Until some of these barriers are eliminated, a hospital’s pathway to the cloud can remain blocked.

The benefits and advantages

Despite myriad challenges getting the cloud adopted within healthcare facilities, the advantages for transition are as strong, if not stronger, than they have ever been.

• Storage in the cloud is very cost effective
• Upscaling or downscaling of IT resources (of almost any kind) ‘on demand’ is quick and easy
• State-of-the-art system and data protection and disaster recovery are provided
• Hardware replacement costs are reduced or eliminated
• The resources to maintain or upgrade on-premise infrastructure are freed up

Yet, with all of these benefits, there is still one unanswered question thwarting cloud migration and that is..

How do I do it?

5 strategic steps to help hospitals migrate data to the cloud

Step 1 – Focus on data first

All too often, hospital leadership teams get tunnel-vision when trying to move their applications to the cloud. Not only is this challenging – many applications weren’t built with the cloud in mind – but it’s also the wrong way to think.

By and large, it’s not the applications that are the strategic asset; it’s the data they contain. So, healthcare organisations should be focusing on moving data before moving applications to the cloud.

Step 2 – Start with the lowest handing fruit: legacy application data

If you plan to use the cloud to host all or most of your patient and administrative data, it’s easy to consider taking the ‘big bang’ approach and get it all done in one hit.

Take a deep breath!

Don’t set yourself up for failure. The cloud is a very different beast than locally owned, on-premise solutions. Start with a trial project. Pick one application, preferably a legacy application, as these are generally the most vulnerable and prone to cyber-attack. Once the data from a legacy application has been moved to the cloud, you can effectively decommission those applications, saving time, costs, and manpower.

Mistakes will almost certainly be made, but you’ll learn an inordinate amount in the process, which will help you create a blueprint for your future success.

Step 3 – Consider an Independent Clinical Archive in the cloud

Where the data resides and how you access it is an essential consideration. It’s all very well to make the decision to transition to the cloud, but you still need to know…

• Where your data is going to live
• That it is being looked after properly
• That it is readily available and accessible to your users
• That your users have the tools they need to carry out their duties.

One way to satisfy all of the above is to deploy an Independent Clinical Archive.

BridgeHead’s ICA, HealthStore®, enables hospitals to easily move live and legacy patient and administrative data to the cloud. By extracting, consolidating, ingesting, indexing, storing, and protecting healthcare data of all types and formats within HealthStore in the cloud, that information can be easily accessed. Typically, this would be through a web portal or through hospital systems, such as the EPR or PACS, to display that data ‘in patient context’ and provide clinicians with a complete 360-degree patient view.

HealthStore offers full information lifecycle management capabilities to ensure compliance and governance obligations are met. It also ensures data is stored efficiently and cost-effectively, according to its value. The tool also offers many additional capabilities to meet specific clinical workflows and pathways, such as secure image capture (e.g. for patient-generated data), diagnostic-grade medical image viewing (including on mobile devices), and a timeline of patient encounters.

Step 4 – Use a reputable cloud vendor

There are a number of cloud providers, each of them vying for your attention, so it’s important to research and choose one you can trust.

Microsoft Azure offers a comprehensive cloud computing service for healthcare. Enabled primarily through Microsoft-managed datacentres, Azure provides integrated cloud services and functionalities across a wide variety of IT provisioning options, such as compute, storage, database, networking, developer tools and other functionality, designed to seamlessly integrate with your healthcare environment and achieve efficiency and scalability.

Beyond these services, Azure also works in concert with BridgeHead’s Independent Clinical Archive. This provides a central repository for patient and administrative data to ensure data interoperability solutions for healthcare.

Step 5 – Scale it and share it

After you’ve completed your first pilot, you and your team will have garnered a lot of insight, knowledge and experience. You’re then in a great position to apply your learnings to new projects, as well as sharing your new-found skills with others in your organisation.

With everything you’ve learnt on your journey to the cloud, you can also share it with other healthcare organisations – just as Darren Atkins, Chief Technology Officer at Chief Technology Officer at East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust, did with his own Microsoft-powered AI technologies.

It was Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu that said, ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.’ This seems very apt when considering the journey that healthcare organisations need to make to transition to the cloud. However, the benefits of making this move are plain to see.

Cloud migration means you will reduce cost. You will increase efficiency. You will reduce risk. You will create an environment by which clinicians have access to all of the information they need, when they need it. And you will be in a position to truly leverage your data as a strategic asset by which financial and operational, as well as clinical, decisions can be made for a better employee and patient experience.

About the author

Lucy is an Enterprise Channel Manager within our One Commercial Partner organisation a Microsoft. After spending 12 months supporting the Media and Telecommunications industry, she’s now aligned to Healthcare. In this short time at Microsoft, she has already seen how technologies can transform commercial and public sector organisations. It’s evident how our technology, alongside our extensive partner ecosystem, work together to deliver transformative products and services to our customers. Microsoft AI and cloud services are completely changing how  organisations operate, and Lucy is excited to have the opportunity to work with a talented team to deliver this to healthcare customers.

The post Healthcare’s ready for the cloud: 5 steps for a successful migration appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Ever since the first commercial emergence of mainframes in the 60s – generation 1 IT – the battle lines between IT and ‘the business’ had been drawn and the war between innovation and governance has waged without respite. Informing and achieving change in the early days of IT was glacially slow, and hellishly expensive. Control was managed by men (and the odd woman) in white coats behind locked doors who appeared to speak a foreign language. If the business were lucky, very lucky, they eventually got some of what they wanted, 6 months after they wanted it, and far too late for it to be of any use.

Newfound freedoms

The Windows PC, and with it Microsoft’s generation 2 distributed computing model of the 80s, initially saw the battle swing wildly in the favour of Agility. The businesspeople celebrated their newfound freedom with the rampant and unbridled spread of Access databases, Excel spreadsheets, and personal laser printers. The IT people sulked, pining for the days of the dominance of control. Business had agility, but now realised they needed help. No-one was happy.

By the early 1990s, this distributed IT model (and its associated, often devolved IT budgets) had resulted in a somewhat out-of-control and completely un-coordinated IT function. You could easily call it chaos. Data could be found (and lost) everywhere; duplication and waste were rife; complexity exploded; never-ending technical refresh became the norm; and unreliable and badly deployed IT became commonplace.

Total cost of ownership

To aid the plight of the miserable Head of IT, and to help put a name to his or her pain, Gartner Group famously coined the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model to put some metrics around the concept of “hidden” IT costs, and so a move toward centralising the management of the organisation’s IT investments began. Slowly but surely, security and risk arguments and spiralling costs led to “best practice” IT operating models, and the tensions of a hampered agility returned. Superficially, there was peace, but the relationship was dysfunctional, and at times even adversarial.

The turn of the millennium inspired the massively expensive, red herring, no-material-benefit-achieved, IT-centred hype-storm known as Y2K. The sage commercial wisdom and credibility that the TCO concept had begun to help build for IT in the eyes of the business was damaged. Hot on the tail of Y2K, came a second IT-driven hype storm promising to the business-people massive changes to the entire way we do business, a gold rush of instant fortune – but in an instant, the “dot-com” bubble had boomed and burst. IT’s last shreds of credibility, and a decade of its future potential budgets, evaporated.

Us vs. them

As a result of the earlier rampant uncontrolled demand, the loss of trust in IT and its associated TCO centric expenditure management model, the IT function was sentenced to reside in the “central services” half of the organisation chart, alongside the HR, Operations, Legal and Accounting teams, and firmly in the Cost Centre columns of the accounts that the latter maintained and closely scrutinised. IT spend was perpetually under pressure, controlling priorities for satiating demand was often IT’s problem, and IT’s lack of responsiveness or ability to meet all demand was often cited as the reason for a given business’ lack of success against competitors.

An “Us and Them” culture had again emerged, and since around 2003 IT had found itself largely being seen as a necessary yet misunderstood evil, while the consumer market’s appetite for technology seemed to know no bounds.

But against this backdrop, over the past 15 or so years, things in the marriage have gradually improved. Our ideas of best practice for an IT Operating Model that works for the business too have solidified and become broadly accepted by consensus. Life has improved, and IT is again more valued than it was in the dark millennial days, but something was still not optimal. Today, we find that all the process and procedure to coordinate this fragile working relationship takes a considerable amount of effort and time. And all the while, the speed of change in the business market is accelerating around us.

Dreaded disruptors

The lunch of the huge dominant incumbent market forces is suddenly being eaten by the dreaded “disrupters” – and entirely new business models are changing the macroeconomic landscape seemingly overnight. These new businesses can scale massively in no time because of the availability of the apparently bottomless availability of ‘Pay as You Grow’ cloud. But it’s more than even just that. These new business models are almost entirely enabled – and are often completely created by – the innovative development of new applications of technology.

The business, having for many years labelled corporate IT as an overhead that needed to be delivered as cost effectively as possible, sat up and realised that the opposite was now true. IT could be their saviour and something to covet, not something to despise.

And at the exact same time, the corporate IT guys realised that a ‘good, but not great’ corporate IT Operating Model (ITOM) that has been controlling a carefully centrally managed ‘Buy and Build’ IT platform was too just slow to provide the agility that the business need for their Business Operating Model (BOM) to be competitive.

Both business and IT both seemingly arrived at the same destination. That they needed a new ‘OM’. One that linked an ITOM with a BOM more tightly allowing the best of agility and control. This new operating model we describe as a DOM. A Digital Operating Model. Powered by the cloud.

The digital operating model

So, where does our story take us from here? If we accept that organisations need a new kind of operating model. A digital operating model. How does one go about creating such a thing?

The answer is the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure. Following a structured and methodical framework is the best way for you to achieve this ambition. Covering everything from Strategy, Planning, Readiness, Migration, Innovation through to Governance, Management, and Operation, it’s the most detailed and most comprehensive cloud adoption framework ever written.

Do you want to discover what the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure is and how it can help your business create a digital operating model to once and for all settle the battle between agility and control?

Book your place at one of my sessions at Future Decoded.

How to design a methodology for adopting and governing the cloud

01 Oct 11:30 – 12:30 | L3 Session Room 7

01 Oct 14:30 – 15:30 | L3 Session Room 8

02 Oct 14:00 – 15:00 | L3 Session Room 8

Also, keep your eyes peeled for a new book “Thinking of Building a Digital Operating Model with the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework?” written by myself and three colleagues, which is launching at Microsoft Ignite in November.

You can also explore more about the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure – from getting started to becoming fully operational in the cloud. You’ll find tools, guides, and narratives designed to help you identify business outcomes that will ease your adoption journey.

Find out more

Watch Dan’s session from Future Decoded

About the author

Dan Scarfe is the UK Founder and EVP Global Solutions for Microsoft UK’s Partner of the Year New Signature. Dan is part of the global strategy and portfolio function, which sets forward direction, product and service definition and go to market activities globally. This work has included envisioning and launching New Signature’s FY20 GTM. Dan is well known for his subject matter expertise around the Microsoft Cloud, with operating models and the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework as specialist subjects.  He sits on the global Azure Partner Advisory Council and is the author of two books. A technologist at heart, there is nothing Dan likes more than talking in front of people extolling the virtues of how technology can deliver meaningful impact to help organisations around the world go digital.

The post The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure: Settling the six-decade war between Agility and Control appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.