 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering.conf18, brought to you by Splunk. Welcome back to splunk.conf18, hashtag Splunk.conf18. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We love to talk to the customers, Stu. We've had seven out of 10 of our interviews today, have been with the customers. Tony Dela Sander was here as the chief architect at the Cooperators Group Limited Insurance Company up in Canada, leader in that field. Tony, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. So we were talking off camera about some of the innovation that's going on in Toronto. And we want to get to that. Innovation is actually in your long title. Yeah. I shortened it up a bit over time. But tell us about your role as chief architect and then some of the other areas that you touch. Yeah, certainly. So my primary role at the Cooperators Group is to serve as chief architect for the group of companies. And so it's a fancy term to mean that I influence how we invest in technology and process for our strategy and for our operational imperatives. I also have responsibility for information security within our organization. So I have a great team led by a CISO at the Cooperators Group. And essentially our role is to protect the data of our clients. We have a million unique clients across Canada that entrust us with a lot of personal and confidential data. We have thousands of financial advisors throughout the company. And so we have retail outlets throughout the entire geography of Canada. And essentially we collect a lot of data and with respect to policies for commercial businesses, for private clients, for subscribers, et cetera. And I also manage an innovation portfolio for the organization. And so essentially I'll work with our business stakeholders within the organization to figure out how we could accelerate new businesses, accelerate new capabilities with the use of technology. Right? Stu's excited. That's a big, big, big role that you have. I want to send the regime you have for security. So the CISO reports to you. Yes, sir. And there's a separate CIO. Is that right? There is. Yeah, so I report to the Executive Vice President and CIO of the Cooperators Group of Companies. And my responsibility within the organization is to report back to our CIO and all the responsibilities that I talked to you about. Okay, so the CISO technically reports up through the CIO. The CISO reports up through me into the CIO. Yeah. Which is, that's a whole another interesting discussion. Maybe if we have time we can talk about that. Absolutely. So a lot of data. I mean, we think about insurance company regulated. You got your claim systems, which are critical. You have your agent systems, which are also critical. Different types of data. Both data on customers, but when you talk about the data that you guys collect, where's it come from? What are you trying to do with that data? Yeah, so I'll start with the motive, right? The problem that we're trying to solve. And so I'll say first and foremost, we're an insurance company. We offer assurance and protection to our clients, right? And so in the process of offering assurance and protection to our clients, they entrust us with massive amounts of data, like as we mentioned before. But we also need to set a good example because a lot of the assurance, some of the assurance that we offer to our clients is also cyber protection. We offer cyber insurance to our clients. We need to set a good example. We need to demonstrate resilience, right? Splunk is a primary tool in our arsenal where we're showing our clients that we have good resilience to be able to detect and respond to security threats when they happen. That's part of our mandate, right? So our responsibility with respect to using Splunk is to collect data from all of our major systems within our organization. We use Splunk to monitor. We use Splunk to detect. And we also use Splunk to respond when something is going on. This is really interesting. You're being proactive about, from an actuarial standpoint, your risk, you're being very proactive. What many, if not most, insurance companies would do is say, okay, what's the history? And are there any high profile breaches? And as opposed to what you're doing, sounds like you're really inspecting what the policies and the procedures and the technology of your clients is. Well, I think you hit on an important point, right? And so the important point is that the art of actuarial science is to rely on a lot of history in the past to predict the risks of the future. But the reality is that model is falling apart very quickly because there is very little history for cyber threats. And the other aspect of it is, it's inconsistent, it's evolving, and it's changing on a regular basis, right? And so that's why you use platforms like Splunk. Use platforms like Splunk to detect new threats and to advance new correlations. What should we be concerned about? Which threats are relevant to us? Which ones can we ignore? And unless you have good platforms to do correlation, unless you have good automation, you're going to need a large army of people to chase things that might not be relevant to either you or your clients. Tony, your industry usually has quite a bit of M&A is to kind of fund the growth that's going on. Curious, how does Splunk and your data strategy fit into M&A type? Yeah, yeah, and so I think that's one of the biggest potential uses of Splunk for us, right? And so the way that insurance is evolving right now is insurance companies are all trying to figure out how they get involved in the loss prevention game, right? In the past, it's all been about assurance, right? It's all been about protection. And so when you think about the internet of things is one of the biggest untapped opportunities for insurance companies, it's all about data, right? So smart homes, smart buildings, cars outfitted with telematics, so it's every history, you wearing wearable devices so in terms of health and health insurance and life insurance protection, et cetera. All of this data is meaningful to offer value to clients beyond what we've been able to do in the past. One of the things we've looked at, I know the industry's looking at is, well, how do you value that data? Is that something your company's gotten into? Yeah, absolutely, and so part of what we need to figure out is how to model that data to give the right level of engagement to the customer. So to create that two-way engagement with the customer, right? How am I doing? How am I driving? Is the weather a threat for me in the foreseeable future in terms of things that I need to protect? Is there a hail storm coming? Should I have alerts and ask clients to move some of their valuables indoors? I mean, all of these are things that will increase that engagement with our clients, because face it, with insurance, your clients engage with you two times a year, right? Two major times, policy renewal, and if they're unfortunate enough to have a claim, right? We need to have a better game, much more proactive game with them. So you're, in a lot of ways, a risk consultant with your clients, right? So describe that. So your client comes to you, says they're interested, or you go to them, you're interested in security, insurance. Where does it start? Do you ask them you have Splunk? Do you advise them as to, or do you go and look at their policies and procedures? Well, how does it work? So I think Splunk is one of those valuable assets that enables the capability, right? Insurance, the game is becoming all about data, having massive amounts of data, and being able to use that data to help assess the risks for a client properly, right? Because without having good data, everything is a great guess these days. I mean, with climate change, with cyber risks evolving, with customers' preferences changing, data is going to be the meaningful difference in terms of understanding what risks a client has, what the probability is, and how to write a meaningful policy for them, where they're engaged, and they understand it well enough as well. Understand it well enough to prevent some of their losses, and that's really the issue that we're trying to figure out. How do we help clients understand their risks and then prevent losses, prevent or minimize losses for them? And in what role does Splunk play in that? Are you a client? Are you an advisor? Or you encourage your customers to use Splunk? How does it all work? So we're talking about our future roadmap right now, and this is what we're trying to figure out with Splunk. This is where we see the strategic opportunities with Splunk, right? And so when we look at the cooperators, the way that cooperators has been using Splunk in the past is for their security sim. We were one of the very first large companies in Canada to put our security sim on Splunk. We were the very first large company in Canada to put our sim in Splunk cloud, right? And so we were very proud with being able to work with Splunk for charting that course, right? For setting the example. Our next course is how do we leverage a platform as powerful as Splunk now to give value to our customers? We're protecting our customers' data assets, and now it's about returning valuable insights back to the customers in terms of loss prevention. That's our forward-thinking approach in terms of how we stay ahead, in terms of leveraging this as a unique asset, as a unique capability. So your leader, you've got street cred, you can now extend that to your client base. I mean, for an insurance company, risk, you know, chaos is cash, as I like to say. I mean, it's opportunity for you guys. And to the extent that you can help clients mitigate that risk, it's win-win. It's essentially, for them, you know, the reduction in expected loss, it can actually, I hate to say this, but it could actually pay for the insurance, which is, I would think, attractive. It's a massive win, and I think, you know, the other part that people need to think differently about is the way that people consume insurance will change dramatically as well in the next 10 years. How so? And so where you think now that, you know, your typical home and auto insurance, you will buy an annual policy. Well, the reality is that home sharing, car sharing, ride sharing, insurance will change to what we call episodical, right? And so essentially, you'll be consuming insurance for an activity, right? And the only way that you'll be able to sort of drive that activity in a meaningful way is to have a lot of data on that activity, right? Where are you driving? How did you drive? You know, what are the risks associated to when you're driving in the geography that you're driving? Where are you renting out your home? What are the rooms to which client? And so understanding all of those elements give us the best opportunity at giving you just-in-time insurance for the right risks. Insurance as a service. I love it, personalized for me. I mean, the model generally, as a consumer, is broken. It's very bespoke. Insurance company doesn't know who I am. It's just like to check a bunch of boxes off and they send me another form every year and advise some new things. And I don't even know what half the time they are. That's exactly right, right? And the only way you're able to personalize is to have all of that data on an individual, on a company, on an event, right? So we give you insurance for you based on your needs, based on your risks. Tony, we know there's a lot of AI happening up in the Toronto area. Maybe our audience might not know. Tell them a little bit about that and how you're thinking about AI and what interest you have and what Splunk's talking about when they talk about AI and all that. You're absolutely right. I mean, there's a massive amount of artificial intelligence activity in the Toronto Kitchener Corridor within Southern Ontario. I would say it's early days for insurance in terms of how we leverage AI. I think some of the early wins for us have been what we refer to as chatbots or virtual assistants, right? Helping clients. So this is basically speed and convenience for clients, right? Clients need to know something very quickly, very predictive, short-tailed answers. We're there for customers who choose to do that. Where it's going next is helping clients assess risk and predict outcomes associated to risks, right? And so there's a lot of different use cases that we're working. We have partnerships with startups, partnerships with mainstream organizations like Splunk is an important partner for us in this area and, of course, academic institutions that are investing, right? This is all part of it. For the sales channel, for the risk channel, for claims processing. So imagine being able to submit a claim on a mobile device, gathering all that data, being able to correlate that data to say, we've seen this before, right? Based on the correlation, here's your damages. We could process this as quickly. Here's the experts you need to go to. Here's the restoration facilities that you'll engage. Those are massive opportunities for client service and for an ability for an insurance company to settle things quickly, right? We're talking about weather before. It's obviously a changing dynamic. It's a changing variable. And now maybe it's modelable, I don't know. But clearly, whether incidents are on the rise, seems to have caught companies and probably insurance companies, a little bit off guard, climate change, et cetera. This is boiling seas as we've heard. What are you guys, what's your position on that? How do you accommodate that and pass it on to your customers? Well, I think this is what we're well known for, right? And so first of all, we're not going to be able to control the weather, but what we'll be able to do is prevent it from getting worse, right? And so when you'll hear the leadership within our organization talk, especially our CEO, our CEO is very passionate about building resilient communities. And that starts with making sure that we're building communities in the right spots, not in flood plains, not in areas of high risk of forest fires or other things that you could potentially prevent within a certain geography. And so that's first and foremost, right? And so we're a leader in this space in Canada. How do you become a leader in this area? You collect data, understand the geography, understand the trends associated to it, understand the future risks associated to those geographies based on weather trends, and then lobby governments, builders, entrepreneurs, everybody, land development consortiums, to say we need to build communities in better places. We need to build more resilient communities. And then thereafter, it's making sure that you're leveraging data to be able to predict and minimize losses for clients in those areas, right? And that's what you'll use weather data for, right? Who do I need to alert? We have threats on the way. What can we prevent? How do we minimize these losses for Canadians? I think the big risk that we all need to understand if the weather continues to change at the same pace, people will not be able to afford the risks, right? And so the insurance will rise exponentially and we won't have a sustainable model for the future. So it's clear for you guys, it's really all about the data. One of the challenges that a lot of companies in your industry have is the data, it's about the data for them too. Insurance companies, you can argue, IT companies in many respects, they develop products that are put together by technologists. But a lot of the data is in silos. Has Splunk allowed you to break down those silos and is that in part why you're a leader? Well, I could talk about where Splunk has been able to offer us that ability is with security, right? And so we have data, we have information security, log data associated to our systems and our application everywhere. On-prem, at-partner sites, in our agency offices, on different endpoint devices, in the cloud with our different service providers. So what Splunk has been able to do is us to be able to aggregate that data, consume that data, build valid use cases, and to correlate that and raise proper alerts, right? That's our main priority right now is to build resilience with information security. That knowledge will take us to these other areas that we want to do and offering now the value back to our clients, right? Embed that value into our product offerings is our next logical step. Awesome, Tony, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. You're welcome. It's good to meet you. It's been a pleasure. Have the leaves changed in Toronto? Yeah, it's Toronto, by the way, Stu, no tea. It's coming, it's coming fast. Right, right, any day now. Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from splunk.conf18.