How Is Big Data Is Changing The Insurance Industry

We live in a world of Big Data. Petabytes, Zettabytes, Yottabytes of data. The Internet of Things (IoT) increasingly connects day-to-day appliances, machines and equipment with each other. Billions of devices constantly recording data: sensors, cameras, microphones, thermostats, pressure gauges, RFID chips, attached to everything from mobile phones to industrial hardware.

Contrast this with early Business Interruption (BI) insurance in the 1860's when obtaining reliable records to quantify losses would have been difficult, long before the advent of modern accounting and reporting standards. Most records were manually created until as recently as the 1990's when transition from paper to computer accelerated. Even then a 3 1/2" floppy disk only stored 1.44MB and joining multiple Excel sheets was not possible.