CASE STUDY
LIC achieved DPDP compliance in just two months and reduced internal data breaches by 85%
Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) is one of the largest and most trusted life insurance providers in India. Established in 1956, LIC has a vast portfolio of products, including life insurance, pension plans, and investment options, serving millions of customers across the country. With a strong emphasis on customer satisfaction, financial stability, and social responsibility, LIC has earned a reputation for reliability and integrity in the insurance sector. Over the years, LIC has consistently expanded its reach, leveraging both traditional methods and digital platforms to cater to the evolving needs of its diverse customer base.
Reduction in data security management maintenance costs
faster issue resolution related to data security
hours saved per week per engineer/analyst
Reduction in internal data breaches
As a leader in the life insurance industry, LIC manages a vast amount of sensitive customer data that must adhere to strict regulatory compliance. This data is regularly accessed for various tasks, including resolving customer issues, launching new products, processing claims, underwriting, and refining future strategies. However, as Sudarshan Nagraj, Head of Data & Analytics at LIC, pointed out, the inability to efficiently access data stored across different systems due to security concerns led to considerable operational inefficiencies.
"Our inability to use our own data with ease resulted in slow decision-making, delays in product launches, sluggish customer response times, and, most importantly, an increased risk of non-compliance with regulations"
Sudarshan Nagraj
Head of Data & Analytics at LIC
Anamika Khatri, Director of Data Intelligence at LIC, elaborated on the issue, saying, "The problem of either too much security or too little security was widespread across systems, which hindered our ability to make the best use of data at the necessary speed." Employees with unclear access to data often had to seek approval or wait for colleagues with higher clearance to retrieve the information they needed, causing delays in daily tasks. For instance, underwriters or claim adjusters could not quickly access the most up-to-date policyholder data, which in turn delayed claim approvals or the introduction of new policies.
Additionally, with data dispersed across various systems or locked behind complex access layers, employees found it difficult to collaborate effectively, resulting in project delays and slower response times to customer requests. The product development process, which requires adherence to numerous regulatory guidelines, was also hindered. Without the appropriate access to regulatory documents or past product data, the compliance process could be delayed or mishandled, leading to unnecessary setbacks in product approvals.
On the customer service front, representatives often lacked access to critical customer data—such as recent claims, policy changes, or payment histories—leading to longer hold times, inefficient call transfers, and slower issue resolutions. This frustrated customers who struggled to get timely and accurate support. Moreover, without proper data access, customer service teams were unable to offer personalized solutions or recommendations, which are key to building long-term customer loyalty.
The lack of trust in accessing accurate and complete data, due to inconsistent permissions and controls, further impacted employee morale and productivity, contributing to errors and inefficiencies.
Sudarshan envisioned a centralized data security system that would seamlessly integrate across various data sources, enabling quick and easy data access for teams throughout LIC, all while upholding robust security protocols. This approach would empower employees to perform their tasks more efficiently, foster collaboration, and ensure compliance, ultimately driving better overall organizational performance.
"We aimed to deploy a data access layer that works across our entire data infrastructure, offering an intuitive user interface for easy data access. Essentially, we wanted to cultivate a strong data culture within the firm"
Sudarshan Nagraj
Head of Data & Analytics at LIC
LIC evaluated several market solutions, including Metabase, PopSQL, and Mode Analytics. However, these platforms fell short in meeting the security needs of LIC. Colrows stood out due to its fine-grained security capabilities, including support for Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) across a wide range of data sources.
LIC started with an assessment and proof of concept (PoC) to test the solution’s fit. During the evaluation, multiple databases were onboarded, and Colrows was adopted by several departments within the organization.
"Colrows' data security is highly comprehensive and capable of addressing every use case we encountered. It’s exactly what we were looking for"
Anamika Khatri
Director of Data Intelligence
Regulatory mandates restrict technology teams from accessing sensitive customer data, requiring LIC to copy data from production environments to lower environments and mask it before granting access for issue resolution. With Colrows SQL Editor, combined with its data security features, this process was entirely eliminated. Now, developers can directly query production databases, with Colrows ensuring that they only see the data they are authorized to access.
The conversational interface in Colrows proved to be the perfect addition. It significantly boosted the overall performance of the team and reduced reliance on tech teams for data, ultimately freeing up a considerable amount of time for both technology teams and data analysts.
With Colrows' data security seamlessly integrated across datastores and channels, LIC was able to consolidate all its data access policies into a single location. The declarative approach to defining data access and redaction policies, combined with support for RBAC and ABAC, significantly reduced the effort required to maintain policies across various applications and datastores. For the first time, LIC now has a centralized repository for all data access policies, ensuring consistency across multiple data stores and access channels.
In addition, Colrows' Permission API allows for easy evaluation of all access policies across different contexts, simplifying the integration of these policies into various applications. With Colrows, LIC benefits from consistent data access controls that are effectively enforced across datastores and channels.
"For the first time, we've been able to centralize all our data access policies and controls in one place. This has greatly reduced the maintenance efforts of tech teams and increased our velocity helping us become DPDP compliant in record time."
Dhanwal Tangvell
Lead Data Security Engineer, LIC
The Colrows SQL Editor proved to be a game-changer for technology teams, enabling seamless access to data from all sources within a single editor. It also offered collaboration features and workspace management for SQL notebooks, charts, and dashboards— all while ensuring robust data security.
By providing a conversational interface for non-technical staff, Python notebooks for data scientists, and a SQL Editor for tech teams, Colrows completely resolved the data access challenge while ensuring top-tier data security, leading to a substantial reduction in internal data security incidents.
Join LIC and countless other organizations that have revolutionized their approach to data analytics with Colrows.