Verisk Analytics

Helping customers make informed decisions

The company employs about 6,500 people in 27 different countries around the world. Through a series of acquisitions, the company has amassed 14 petabytes of unique and proprietary data assets that it uses to help customers make data-informed decisions. For example:

• In the insurance industry, Verisk is involved in all aspects of rating and claims processing, and is currently innovating with data related to vehicle telematics, IOT, drones, and autonomous cars. They probably helped decide the price you pay for insurance.
• They are involved in pandemic modeling, meaning they run complex simulations to determine how disease might spread in the event of an outbreak.
• In the natural resources space, they look at what’s in the ground – things like titanium, tin, tungsten, and gold; four minerals that make their way into just about every single smart phone, tablet, computer, or piece of technology infrastructure that people use every single day – and they spot human rights violations (such as child labor, or the involvement of militant organizations) that may be occurring within the sourcing of those minerals.
• They help Nielsen Ratings determine whether the people watching commercials are actually buying those products.
• And in the financial services space, Verisk tracks $6.7 trillion of consumer spend every year.

Verisk prides itself on being a good steward of every byte of data it touches, keeping both the company’s own data and the data it processes on behalf of its customers secure. It also prides itself on being first to market with many new products and innovations, and on moving with agility – an imperative which many companies find difficult in the insurance industry, particularly when rules and regulations around data import/export vary by market.

In 2016, Verisk embarked on a 2-year journey to migrate to the cloud, instill a DevOps culture, and automate as much of their processes as possible, with the goal of having capacity, availability and resiliency where their customers are throughout the world.

To achieve this, Verisk bundled three technologies (Amazon Web Services, Chef, and AWS OpsWorks) into a framework they termed the “HOV Lane,” which served as an express route for cloud migration.