“We are providing a ‘Zero Touch’ insurance experience to our customers,” says Gangadhar S J, Head Technology, Digit Insurance

How are you preparing yourself for the post COVID times?
As we are hosted on cloud, hence we do not have to change anything much and the availability and scalability to handle an increase in business post COVID will not be an issue. The only improvement that we are looking at is in terms of availability of wired connections to some of our functions and stability of internet connection at certain pockets.

What has changed post COVID-19, with respect to the Vendors and SI / Partner / Reseller engagements (Including cloud service providers)
In case some of the vendors/service providers continue to WFH, in such a case, we are trying to have the level of productivity and collaboration as it was before lockdown. They are made aware to make necessary arrangements to handle increase in volume, which also includes addition of resources and remote training, hand holding etc which is new to everyone.

Frontend
 – Retail customers: Sales and service channels and customer and partner touch points are digital for us from day one and now we look at increased numbers, due to a shift towards online services. We are providing a ‘Zero Touch’ insurance service for the entire customer journey to our customers.
 – Institutional customers: We are look at continuing to offer seamless experience to our customers through various partners with the help of API integrations.

Digit’s focus will be on which major technologies?
We are not looking at any major changes in technology. Volumes may go up in both sales and services and we have the capability to scale our infra and applications on the move.

How are you preparing your IT team?
In such a time of a crisis, our IT team is working tirelessly to ensure that customers partners and fellow team mates have access to all technologies and seamless processes, more so now that there’s a huge shift towards digital and people are connected remotely. We do regular sprint planning, daily check-ins, review meetings etc to plan a way forward.

How are you preparing your employees globally?
We have used technology to the maximum to keep communication going in our teams. From Life-size, Microsoft Teams to Zoom – all mediums have been utilised. Technology has decentralised data for making complex information and analytics available for all.

Digit has managed to work from home successfully and has derived the best possible results from the business continuity plan. All employees have been equipped with Laptops / WiFi Connections and dongles to help and stay connected. Online trainings and e-learning modules have been created.

Number of Initiatives have been taken to continue the pace of work:

• Launch of our ‘At Home training’, by which we have addressed knowledge gaps through product training across geographies and teams.
• Online Huddle day – for all those who joined us virtually during the lockdown. Sessions have been informative, interactive, and truly a success.
• Daily team calls and e-meetings to track work.
• We have also introduced Virtual Happy Hours to boost the morale and reinforce human connections, where the idea was to have a video call just to chat, play a game, meet and greet each other’s families.

How enterprise security will be taken care of, what changes will we see coming?
The threat landscape is very agile and always keeps changing and to thwart the same our Enterprise Security program must also be very agile and adaptable. We have adopted a risk-based approach for cyber threat evaluation and assess all our critical services based on the risks they face and apply mitigation respectively.

The basics will remain the same to track the effectiveness of the InfoSec program:

1. Management of access
2. DLP (data Loss Prevention) Alerts list
3. End Point Security (Servers / Laptops / Desktops)
4. Ensuring security within supplier agreements
5. Management of technical vulnerabilities, SOC alerts closure

The focus from an office centric security will also be shifted to endpoint centric security to provide a holistic Enterprise Security posture as COVID-19 will push a lot of organizations to adopt the Work From Home (WFH) approach. This will increase the threat landscape and require following controls:

1. Educating the resources to secure home networks and home router
2. For remote working, only approved tools provided by the organizations should be used
3. Using a VPN (virtual private network) on work PC / desktop to connect to official resources
4. Continuous awareness for phishing attacks for all employees
5. End Point security