Data Vault: Archive management with Moody’s Intelligent Risk Platform

Data is regarded as a valued asset in the contemporary business world, and its effective management is essential for strategic planning and organizational growth.

Catastrophe modelers working within insurers are often tasked with efficient storage management in their daily handling of large sets of Exposure Data Modules (EDMs) and Results Data Modules (RDMs).

Therefore, providing modeling teams with efficient archiving tools becomes key for their operational efficiency, as effective archiving techniques necessitate the accurate and secure preservation of historical data for future reference or analysis.

As the industry prepares for 7/1 renewals, the second-largest renewal season, we are pleased to announce the availability of Moody's Intelligent Risk Platform™ (IRP) Data Vault capability. For insurers, this new offering augments the platform to enable secure management of archival data within their tenant boundaries and significantly automates their IT operational workflows.
 

Introducing the Intelligent Risk Platform Data Vault

The IRP Data Vault solution is engineered to address the key challenges and limitations of conventional archive systems. These range from data retrieval complexity, high maintenance costs, data fragmentation, and the risk of data loss.

Here are the key features that make Data Vault stand out:

• Multi-year data archive management: IRP Data Vault is fully integrated with all platform applications (Risk Modeler™, Data Bridge™, ExposureIQ™, TreatyIQ™, and UnderwriteIQ™). This means any exposure database archived from any of the IRP applications will be stored in a unified archive store in the Data Vault.
• 'Undo' accidental data updates: Inadvertent data updates, corruption, or accidental data deletion by end-users are inevitable, making it crucial to build a resilient service to handle these issues. Data Vault comes with a powerful snapshot service that allows you to restore an exposure database to a previous state.
• Preserve key metadata - Data authorization, ownership, tags, exposure, and loss relationships: The value of a data file is insignificant without its context, and it is the file’s metadata that enhances the value of the actual data content. Recognizing its significance, Data Vault constructs a robust metadata repository to contain details including the file owner, date of the archive, server name, source type, exposure set, tags, etc.

Figure 1: Architecture diagram of IRP Data Vault

The relationship between exposure databases and model-generated losses is maintained throughout the Data Vault archive and its restore operations, allowing restoration to their original state when data files are restored to production.
 

High-definition search capabilities

An archive store may contain millions of records, and the ability to locate these archived data artifacts when needed is essential for determining their effectiveness and efficiency. Data Vault’s high-definition search capabilities use business metadata to facilitate the retrieval of archived records with ease.
 

Intelligent IT workflow automation

To eliminate the need for weekly or monthly IT department backups of the exposure and non-exposure databases, Data Vault snapshots are completely automated to allow busy IT teams to focus on supporting other critical business problems.

The comprehensive feature set of Data Vault provides your organization with enhanced risk data governance, streamlines data for regulatory requirements, and enables proactive compliance management.
 

Data Vault in the Moody's Intelligent Risk Platform

A new ‘Archive EDM’ operation is available across IRP applications like Risk Modeler™, UnderwriteIQ™, and ExposureIQ™ that allow business users to archive exposure databases seamlessly.

IRP administrators are empowered with the capabilities to manage archive storage efficiently within the platform storage dashboards. 

Archive data storage growth charts help administrators monitor business usage and their increasing storage needs. The IRP notification services alert when storage consumption nears full capacity.

Build versus buy dilemma and shift in dynamics with Data Vault

One crucial debate that frequently occurs within organizations is whether to build an archiving solution in-house or buy from a vendor. To decide, organizations typically use their standard assessment matrix, which includes elements such as alignment with their strategic objectives, skilled resource availability, development time, and total cost of ownership, etc.

Since matrix analysis differs for each organization, it is best to consider a few critical questions that can help your organization determine the right approach:

• Is it in the best interests of the organization to allocate IT resources to build an archiving solution? This approach can sometimes impact the ability of IT teams to provide support on business-critical tasks.
• Will key data attributes, such as its metadata, be preserved in the archiving solution? Removal of metadata could result in a much longer and prohibitive data search and recovery process.

These matrix analyses can significantly impact this decision. However, Data Vault provides distinct functionalities that are challenging to duplicate outside of the IRP.

Let us briefly examine these features. First, Data Vault offers a cutting-edge feature set for archive management by transforming the traditional concept of an archive file store. It aims to increase the value of archived data by storing essential metadata that enables high-definition search capabilities, which are hard to replicate in custom applications.

Second, outside of the IRP ecosystem, preserving and restoring the entity-data relationship is not easy. The IRP also enhances user experience by streamlining the entire business workflow, offering agility and operational efficiency.

In summary, through its unique features, Data Vault provides organizations with a competitive advantage, simplifying the buy/build decision.
 

Conclusion

Intelligent Risk Platform’s Data Vault archive capability is designed to revolutionize the way companies handle their risk data archive storage and management needs. With seamless integration with IRP applications, unified archive storage, smart purge, and high-definition search capabilities, our solution is poised to become an essential tool for businesses looking to optimize their data management processes. The efficiencies it introduces to IT processes enhance the operational focus that businesses require to achieve excellence.

For more insights, please refer to our previous blog post ‘Achieving next-gen archive and data management: scalable, streamlined and secure,’ which discusses the challenges and solutions in data management and archiving.

We aim to show how the IRP Data Vault offering can benefit your organization in data management within the platform. For additional details or to schedule a demo, please reach out to us at sales@moodys.com.