By Isaac Khaguli

A typical software engineering journey begins with a thorough study of a client’s business requirements to inform the software development process and eventually produce quality solutions that solves the customer’s problem or helps them achieve their objective.

To do this effectively, every software engineer must stay on the leading-edge of development tools, programming techniques and computing equipment. They must also be passionate about great technologies and keep an eye on the future to be ready to tackle any new challenges.

At Turnkey Africa, the engineering team has fully embraced these principles staying up-to-date on state-of-the-art development practices and using the best tools and technologies available to produce highly usable software that address our customer’s needs. Through technologies like cloud computing, we are able to demonstrate the efficacy of technology modernization to enable insurers gain business value, lower their costs and launch new innovations.

That is why in 2021, one of Turnkey Africa’s engineering chief goals is the delivery of on-demand cloud computing services to the insurance industry across Africa to help them improve business agility and efficiency. When It Rains, It Pours is a short 6 part article that discusses several topics including: Big Data, CI\CD, Cryptography, Security, Mobile Cloud Computing and Containerization with a summary of the various action steps you as a key technology player can take to harness their power.

Part 1: Big Data

One one beautiful Tuesday morning this is what happened to one of our clients

Client support: Things have stopped working
IT manager: What is not working?

Client support: Everything, we cannot pay or login or transact anything
IT manager: Let me check the logs… “not enough disk space”, we have used up 3 terabytes? Let me call Turnkey Engineering.

Turnkey Africa Engineering: …Have you tried cloud?

The above actual scenario was an eye opener to us that we needed to prepare for the cloud especially bearing in mind that the insurance industry processes tonnes of data which is mostly sitting on premise.

To facilitate big data preparedness, the Turnkey Africa engineering have divested into creating scalable, smart data houses that are client specific. Working with some of largest insurers across the continent, the team is guided by our system usage metrics which give us an edge in understanding what cloud architecture will work best.

Other than this we are aiming to pioneer a unified analytics warehouse that helps insurers consolidate data metrics and provide actionable insights for internal departments such as underwriting, claim, sales and business forecasting.

Big Data, in a nutshell refers to the large amounts of data produced by various programs in a very short duration of time. This mostly comprises huge data streams from basic system interactions points or backend sources such as workflow engine triggers, API call and so forth.

This data needs to be analyzed either in batch mode or in prime time for fewer extreme cases after storing the data in secondary devices or cached memory where filtering has to occur on a frequent basis in order to provide timely updates either in terms of reports or dashboard metrics for quick decisions. This means that a delay in analysis will impact customer satisfaction or impact speed of action in a world where timely and accurate results are expected.

With these in mind, the Turnkey engineering team has taken action by leveraging innovative tools in key areas such as; Scaled Computing power, where we have adopted technology that allows us to scale at ease anytime, automatically, securely and at cost saving rates when it comes to storage and computing capability; Frameworks, where we are employing tested big-data frameworks such as Apache samza, Hadoop among others; and finally, Data Engineering; where we dedicate development resources to understanding the dynamics of data, employ assisted machine learning and adapt to ever changing needs of the insurance industry.

Exciting Times!! Stay tuned for part two of When It Rains, It Pours from the Computing Cloud: CI\CD.