Hitachi Content Platform Enables Accident Exchange To Maintain GDPR Compliance

Hitachi Vantara announced it is improving the data strategy of motoring accident management company Accident Exchange through the use of Hitachi Content Platform (HCP). The HCP data storage solution helps Accident Exchange to better manage and govern the data it produces, collects and retains in an effort to seamlessly adopt and comply with new industry regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Based in the United Kingdom, Accident Exchange is a subsidiary of the Automotive and Insurance Solutions (AIS) Group, established in 2004. The company hires replacement vehicles for customers involved in accidents, while it manages repairs to their damaged cars. Historically, Accident Exchange relied on a traditional data management approach, whereby the producers and consumers of organizational data were both siloed and based on proprietary technologies. These data and technology silos made the management, governance and location of data very difficult, especially as the number of data producers and consumers continued to grow.

By integrating HCP into their data and business processes, Accident Exchange has simplified the management of insurance claim data, making communication with stakeholders and third parties easier, more accurate and more efficient. The solution abstracts files away from the creating application to ensure that all the data for each claim is stored in one place. This guarantees a quality audit trail for each customer interaction, which, in turn, helps the company stay compliant with legislation, such as the upcoming GDPR.

“Operating in a siloed fashion did not give us the data control we needed, with multiple proprietary systems to manage, back up and protect all customer interactions. With a minimum retention period of 10 years, our data volumes were in danger of ballooning,” said Ray Ford, CTO at AIS Group. “The unique capabilities of HCP give Accident Exchange complete control over its business application data, from call recordings to engineers’ crash reports. With HCP, we can prevent changes to evidentiary documentation, defensibly retain and delete data, anonymize customer details, and simultaneously ensure full compliance with insurance and financial industry regulations.”

HCP is the only technology offering that allows organizations to bring together object storage, file sync and share, cloud storage gateways, and sophisticated search and analytics to create a tightly integrated, simple and smart cloud storage solution. HCP provides massive scale, multiple storage tiers, powerful security, cloud capabilities and multitenancy, all backed by legendary Hitachi reliability. Designed to preserve data for long durations, HCP carries built-in data protection mechanisms and fluently evolves as storage technologies change. Furthermore, HCP is able to address a wide range of challenges through a thriving community of third-party software partners as well as traditional and cloud storage protocols. HCP eliminates the need to maintain separate systems for each workload and bridges the gap between traditional applications and modern modes of operation. Customers enjoy faster time to value and service providers accelerate time to market by eliminating the hassles of do-it-yourself integrations or forced-fit interoperabilities.

“There’s no one-size-fits-all solution that works for everybody. That’s why it was important for us to listen to the business challenges that Accident Exchange faces and continuallyevolve our portfolio in ways that can address a wide range of data challenges while delivering net-positive business outcomes,” said Peter Sjoberg, vice president, Global Content and Data Intelligence Business, Hitachi Vantara.

“Heavily regulated industries, like insurance and financial services, often have the staff and budgets in place to adopt to new regulations like GDPR, but not all organizations can be so well prepared,” he explained. “The value of our portfolio is steeped in the flexibility of our data architecture and our focus on getting data under management with a focus on quality.  This is the key to supporting initiatives like GDPR with minimal disruption to your business – regardless of industry.”

Sjoberg added, “With respect to Accident Exchange, by building their technology foundation on HCP as the centralized data hub, they are able to better service their customers with confidence in how their data is processed and stored. More importantly, the flexibility that HCP affords them means that they are also ready to embrace the next set of industry regulations without overhauling their technology foundation.”