As one of the largest health benefits companies in the U.S., Anthem Inc. maintains a broad portfolio of plans and related services. That requires a sophisticated information-technology structure to support it, and a key element of Anthem’s approach is to provide its internal developers with the tools needed to keep operations running smoothly and meet customer needs.

“Since we’re serving 40-plus million members, we have thousands of applications, petabytes of data,” said Mamadou Bah (pictured, right), senior director of cloud strategy and technology at Anthem. “We understand that there’s a lot of complexity in healthcare. And when you have all of this data, you need to make sure it’s secured. And there’s a lot of regulatory challenges. We don’t want our application teams to have to deal with all of those things.”

Bah spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Accenture Executive Summit at the AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas. He was joined by Shaan Mulchandani (pictured, left), AWS security lead at Accenture LLP, and they discussed the self-service model designed to support Anthem’s developers and the role AWS is playing in providing tools for enterprise IT. (* Disclosure below.)

Access to pre-approved tools

Anthem’s solution is a self-service model, where company developers can access services that are pre-approved for safe use within the organization. The firm has partnered with Amazon Web Services Inc. to provide developer-ready solutions to meet IT demands across the enterprise.

“How can we empower our developers internally to focus on business deliverables?” Bah asked. “Our service catalog project allows them to use all of that in an AWS account where they are self-sufficient.”

Accenture works with Anthem to help the health benefits company innovate its products and services, both in the cloud and on-premises. The kinds of tools that AWS provides, such as the developer-ready SageMaker platform for cloud machine learning, will be instrumental for businesses operating in the healthcare space, according to Mulchandani.

“These are really the new foundation, and so many companies, no matter the size, are leveraging these to build for a better experience,” Mulchandani said. “It’s not just about technology, but it’s how it’s applied to support certain business operations like mergers and acquisitions or, as the strategy grows, from one cloud to multicloud. We’re looking at how we can work with our clients to get them there as soon as possible.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit during the AWS re:Invent event. (* Disclosure: Accenture LLP sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Accenture nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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