Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH), announced that it has helped The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, one of the largest insurance providers in the U.S., modernize its mainframe big data infrastructure with Cognizant BIGFrame solution to enable greater business insights, agility and digital services at lower costs.

New York-based Guardian is a Fortune 250 financial services company with a network of over 3,000 financial representatives in more than 70 agencies nationwide. In order to gain greater insights from its mainframe-based data and use the latest digital and cloud technologies to help develop new products and services, Cognizant created a data lake based on the Apache Hadoop framework. A data lake is a massive storage repository and powerful processing engine that has the ability to handle nearly limitless concurrent tasks or jobs at a lower cost than a mainframe.

Using the Cognizant BIGFrame solution, which leverages Cognizant’s extensive big data and mainframe expertise, Guardian was able to fast-track its modernization program while minimizing risk and operational impact. The new big data environment provides comprehensive data-as-a-service to internal teams for self-service analysis, improved decision-making, and faster product development.

“Guardian has embarked on a journey of thoughtful and targeted technology modernization,” said Alex Rosenthal, Assistant Vice President, Enterprise Data Office at Guardian. “We have initiated a big data program focused on building an enterprise data management strategy in line with our digital vision. In order for Guardian to achieve our goals, it was important for us to select the right technologies and partners to help us migrate data from our operational sources into our big data platform. Cognizant’s BIGFrame Solution was well aligned and helped us create a robust mechanism to move data processing off of the mainframe into Hadoop. This enabled us to accelerate our enterprise data platform implementation.”

“Enterprises are experiencing a digital revolution. Yet, when it comes to information management, many are saddled with legacy architecture that lags in price-performance and agility, preventing optimal use of technology advances,” said Karthik Krishnamurthy, Senior Vice President, Analytics and Information Management, Cognizant. “We are pleased to have helped Guardian embrace digital technologies and build a strong data, information, and analytics foundation using our BIGFrame solution. The ease of accessing and integrating data from multiple sources and migrating that data to Hadoop has enabled Guardian to transform the way it does business and enhance its digital-readiness.”