Infrastructure Design & Build
Always-on data technology to enable rapid iteration
Our technology team can design and build the infrastructure you need to extract the value from your data. Some clients have data-engineering teams, some chose to rely on us to integrate the core infrastructure required for data-driven decision making. We call this the ‘data backbone’ of any program that facilitates any on-going optimisation. We are fundamentally, always trying to remove the technology burden of the critical data pipeline architecture so our clients can focus on the feedback required for model refining that delivers their competitive advantage. If required therefore, we help evaluate, select the best-in-class or most cost-effective and configure technologies for:
- Extract, Transform & Load (ETL)
- API stabilisation
- Data storage
- Data warehouse/lake
- Data Management Platform
- Single customer view
- Machine learning for semi/full data preparation automation and pattern matching
We have experienced project directors that have lead members of our team hacking together prototypes or ‘minimum viable product’ to get an enquiry off the ground. Conversely, we have strategically architected corporate projects to be ‘best in class’ before then deploying to internal clients. We’ve delivered infrastructure builds at all points of this spectrum, in both waterfall and agile methodologies.
Elegant solutions require deep technical understanding to simplify the operation by clients and our own team. Our machine learning, semi-automation technologies, data-preparation algorithms and other pipeline techniques all serve to reduce time spent preparing data and maximise time spent optimising the model for or with our clients.
Some of the so-called ‘big data’ challenges we face require significant computational power and for this, we can call on distributed computing nodes available in Cambridge’s high performance computer centres, to compute significant datasets.
We are independent of any technology vendors or data repository agencies and therefore not compromised by any commercial arrangements or legacy situations.
Visualisation
We have built many corporate dashboards and rationalised or optimised more than we’ve built, as some corporates discover that their visualisation technology doesn’t do what they envisioned ‘out of the box’. As with the key infrastructure projects above, we go through a discovery phase before selecting the visualisation tech that’s the best fit for your organisation and the phase is as much about the users as it is about the requirements.
As part of analysis, we know that ‘telling the story’ is a critical element of the project’s success and for this we try to fit the visualisation technology to the organisation’s existing chart ‘habits’. Sometimes, ‘stand out’ visualisation is required and we have worked with data journalists and graphic designers to produce arresting infographics that deliver the message clearly.
Governance
Our infrastructure architecture includes data governance policies, procedures for aggregating data, hashing or obfuscation and other Personal Information protection or avoidance. Although we observe strict security policies for our own infrastructure, our policy is to not to store client data, thus minimising potential for security breach. Where relevant, we supply our models as downloads to your infrastructure. We also run our own automatic back-ups and private mirroring to ensure no setbacks in our analysis for clients.