The insurance industry has long faced a frustrating contradiction: it is one of the most data-rich sectors in the world, and one of the most data-poor in practice.
Most core systems hold data hostage. Reports are outdated before they’re printed. Analysts spend more time exporting CSVs than analyzing trends. AI initiatives stall, not because the models are flawed, but because the data isn’t sufficient or accessible to support them.
At Socotra, we believe insurers should be fluent in their own data. That means they can access it instantly, move it wherever needed, and trust it’s complete and correct—all without teams of engineers pushing endless tickets. We call this Data Fluency, and it’s the foundation of our platform.
Insurers’ Data Problems
Most core systems were designed to store transactions, not share them. That’s why so many insurers are still struggling with even the most basic use cases.
These challenges have compounding effects: engineers build brittle point-to-point integrations, product teams wait weeks for reports, actuaries can’t see exposures in real time, and every new system requires another workaround.
It’s slow, expensive, and ultimately a drag on efficiency.
Socotra’s Data Fluency
Socotra’s data fluency is unmatched in the market because we’re the only ones to invest in and integrate open data fluency into every piece of our technology. We believe our customers have a right to access their data quickly, easily, consistently, and even elegantly. With Socotra, data can flow freely and securely across systems, teams, and tools.
There are three parts of data fluency:
Data Availability
Get your data whenever it’s needed, fast. Socotra’s mature cloud offers 99.994% uptime, zero-downtime upgrades, bulletproof security, and industry-leading performance.
Data Accessibility
Use data in whatever way suits your business. Socotra delivers open APIs, a Data Lake, an event stream, and connectors—all documented and easy for developers to use.
Data Quality
Trust in the accuracy and completeness of your data. Socotra supports real-time data access with proper metadata management and full auditability.
Data Availability
Get your data whenever it’s needed, fast. Socotra’s mature cloud offers 99.994% uptime, zero-downtime upgrades, bulletproof security, and industry-leading performance.
Data Accessibility
Use data in whatever way suits your business. Socotra delivers open APIs, a Data Lake, an event stream, and connectors—all documented and easy for developers to use.
Data Quality
Trust in the accuracy and completeness of your data. Socotra supports real-time data access with proper metadata management and full auditability.
Let’s examine each of these in more detail.
Availability: Get Your Data When You Want It
Insurers deal with more data every year—from new lines of business, new channels, and new technologies. Core systems need to keep up with reliability, responsiveness at scale, and security.
Reliability
In 2023 and 2024 combined, Socotra customers upgraded 100 times—-all while experiencing less than 60 minutes of total planned and unplanned downtime across both years. This ensures insurance customers and employees have continuous access to their data, even during infrastructure failures and maintenance windows.
Socotra’s consumer-grade reliability is made possible by its highly resilient cloud-native design, unique among insurance core system providers. This includes:
Non-disruptive upgrades with backward-compatibility
Built-in data center redundancy across multiple AWS Availability Zones
Active/Active recovery type across data centers with automatic failover and load balancing
Responsiveness at Scale
Socotra scales automatically using distributed databases, object storage, and elastic compute resources. Insurers can leverage Socotra’s industry-leading performance to support business growth without bottlenecks—even when handling unexpected traffic surges, adding new data sources, or exploring high-throughput workloads like real-time risk scoring.
Security
When it comes to data security, Socotra relies on technology, not just platitudes.
Many systems enforce security at the application level, forcing insurers to rebuild controls for every interface. In contrast, Socotra enforces role-based access at the data layer and integrates with identity and access management (IAM) platforms to centralize rules. This ensures compliance with regulatory frameworks like GDPR and HIPAA and protects sensitive policyholder information. It also improves productivity, because employees can immediately access the specific data needed for their role.
In addition, Socotra follows end-to-end encryption standards—TLS 1.3 and AES-256—so sensitive data is protected in motion and at rest.
Accessibility: Get Your Data How You Want It
Socotra supports every method insurers may wish to access their data. The core methods are:
Method
What It Is
Common Use Cases
Standardized APIs
Protocols enabling real-time communication and data exchange between systems.
Retrieve policy data for customer or agent portals
Integrate third-party data sources and technologies
Underwrite and quote in real-time
Data Lake Queries
SQL or analytics tools that access raw or semi-structured data from a centralized repository.
Explore data and generate historical or ad hoc reporting
Analyze structured and unstructured actuarial data
Enable real-time business intelligence and analytics
Connectors & Apps
Pre-built integrations supporting bulk data movement and conversion between systems.
Migrate bulk data between platforms
Sync data warehouses, BI dashboards, and CRM systems
Event Stream & Webhooks
Every action within Socotra can be automatically broadcasted to other systems.
Stream real-time data into other systems, such as predictive analytics
Trigger billing and document updates based on policy changes
Operations & Reporting Workbenches
Non-technical user interfaces for accessing and manipulating data in Socotra.
View quotes, policies, and customer data
Generate, view, and export pre-configured reports
View visualizations and metrics in real time
Learning to Access Data
Engineers expect and deserve to understand how their technologies work. Because all Socotra customers run on the exact same version, we’re able to publish highly granular APIs. This serves as a contract with users and results in a uniquely stable platform that insurers can trust and engineers love to build upon. Socotra also allows insurers to configure products graphically or with JSON, a publicly documented and widely used data format that any engineer can use.
Quality: Get Complete Data You Can Trust
Insurance is a data science business at its core. If data is fragmented, stale, or incomplete, it slows decision-making, stalls innovation, and leaves insurers vulnerable to audits and claims disputes.
To maintain high-quality data, insurers must leverage the right technology and establish a data-focused corporate culture with regular governance. Socotra delivers powerful technology that supports clean, complete, and real-time data. Insurers can easily access data for review and validation, as well as support audibility and traceability for advanced master data management. In addition, Socotra’s APIs, rules, and automation allow insurers to implement advanced data monitoring rules as part of an ongoing data management strategy.
Real-Time Data
Legacy systems rely on overnight batch jobs, mirrored databases, and periodic synchronization. That’s a recipe for latency, duplication, and conflicting versions of truth.
Using event streaming, webhooks, and APIs, Socotra’s data architecture supports real-time data. Every transaction is immediately reflected across internal systems, external integrations, and downstream analytics.
Metadata Management
Data governance doesn’t work without clear metadata. As data volume grows, insurers often struggle to locate the right data sets or understand their meaning. Inconsistent naming, poor documentation, and a lack of lineage visibility lead to confusion and duplicated effort.
Socotra enables enterprise-scale governance by making metadata clear, accessible, and interoperable. Our platform is designed to integrate easily with data cataloging and lineage tools, allowing insurers to manage definitions, provenance, and usage history across the data lifecycle.
Complete Auditability
Insurers must have comprehensive logging and audit capabilities built into all layers of their data stack. Socotra’s event stream records every access, change, and system event in a tamper-proof audit trail. Compliance teams get visibility, developers get traceability, and executives get peace of mind.
Socotra’s published and highly granular APIs (documentation) are the foundation for a truly modular core system. They create and expose all policy and billing data—as well as full system functionality—in a transparent and consistent manner. Developers can easily retrieve real-time data, build and automate real-time workflows, and integrate Socotra with other systems.
Socotra Data Lake (documentation) provides a relational view of a book of business in Socotra. Insurers can issue SQL queries across a broad set of tables, including policies, transactions, field values, and charges.
Socotra helps bring carriers’ data architecture into the modern era by including a fully usable Data Lake as part of our standard offering. From day one, customers can query raw, real-time data directly—without waiting for ETL jobs or dealing with redacted exports. This access includes both structured data (e.g., policy terms) and unstructured data (e.g., adjuster notes or uploaded documents), enabling holistic analysis across all insurance data.
This is a major departure from traditional core systems, which treat data lakes as optional add-ons or entirely outside their architecture. Socotra bridges the gap between operational systems and enterprise analytics. With built-in normalization, indexing, and support for unstructured data, Socotra Data Lake gives insurers the complete, queryable data foundation they need to power AI, automation, and modern analytics.
Socotra is built to be part of a larger data ecosystem. That’s why we make it easy to move data where it’s needed. Our pre-built connectors support bulk transfer of minimally transformed data from Socotra Data Lake to popular data platforms like Snowflake and Databricks. This allows insurers to seamlessly integrate Socotra with even the most complex enterprise data architectures.
Socotra’s event stream (documentation) presents a chronological feed of activity within Socotra. Socotra’s webhooks (documentation) are customized callbacks that allow external services to receive real-time notifications when specific events occur.
Together, Socotra’s event stream and webhooks enable a number of use cases:
Trigger integrated workflows based on by key events, such as a policy endorsement initiating billing recalculation and document generation
Automate routines, such as activating a policy renewal procedure when an expiry date approaches
Maintain an audit trail, such as capturing records of policy changes for compliance and auditability in a specialized database
Talk to Socotra today. We’ll show you what data fluency looks like—and what it can do for your business.
