How to store millions of documents. Do it cheaper and easier in the cloud.

Here at Spark Data documents are everywhere, millions of them. Our policy administration systems generate them when processing policies, and handle incoming documents from policy holders. And they are huge and growing fast! Several of our systems are sitting on stores of tens of millions of documents taking up terabytes of data.

For a typical Spark application - policy administration, underwriting, claims etc, we tend to have the following document types:

Documents Out: Policy illustrations, Exit confirmations, arrears letters and so on. With our systems, templates are configured in MS Word by your own staff, and the generated documents are produced in PDF format, digitally signed to protect you and your customers from fraudulent activity.

Documents In: Incoming documents, normally arriving by email, need to be auto-classified and saved against their policy, or against a claim.

We have traditionally used document management systems such as SharePoint or Alfresco for this, which store documents in a database, and deliver what our clients need.

But the cloud is changing that.

With our new Spark Data Cloud Storage interface, we can now do all of this using cloud document storage. The interface makes it easy for users to store, retrieve, and to run searches on document, just as if they were local.

Huge volumes can be maintained this way and we can ditch all the expense and overhead of traditional on-premise hardware. You pay for what you use and avoid pre-purchasing capacity as required by traditional on-premise or data centre solutions. The backups are taken care of with a level of redundancy we can select.

Cloud storage is ideal for remote working and opens the gateway to AI services that will shape business processes over the next few years.

Altogether cheaper, and easier in the Cloud.