Osvaldo Gama recently joined MetaRouter as a Software Engineer Specialist. His job is making it easier to onboard a new client. Many of our clients have multiple websites, so he's creating a tool to make it easier on them and us to onboard all their settings to our system. The new tool will go to one client first and then roll out to every other one. To get to know him a little better, we asked him a little about his background, joining MetaRouter, and his thoughts on the future of the world.
4 min read
The Value of First-Party Compliance
One of our core tenets is creating a customer data ecosystem that collects all data in a first-party context. There are several key ways organizations benefit from this, but we sat down with Michael Yeager, our VP of Engineering, to talk about how that impacts compliance.
Topics: Compliance server-side Technology data regulation Data Security data privacy data accuracy
8 min read
The Battle Against Big Tech For Control Over User Data
Working in the customer data space, MetaRouter has had to butt heads against some of the largest tech companies in existence.
Topics: server-side Data Security cookies big tech
5 min read
The Server-Side Difference
Server-side data processing is becoming more and more of a hot topic in the customer data industry, in light of restrictions and performance issues plaguing users' browsers. It's a solution that is often referenced by multiple companies in the space: Google, Segment, Tealium, and others are all trying to get in the game and boost their capabilities here, with varying degrees of success.
But there is one key difference that sets MetaRouter apart from the rest.
5 min read
How We Process One Billion Events Per Day With Kafka
When we set out to provide a seamless platform for our customers that consumes their customer events and fans them out to any number of destinations they desire, we built our product around “bring your own message queue.”
Topics: data engineering product engineering kafka
3 min read
Creating A Culture of Mentorship
About a year ago, Levi Cook joined our team as an engineering and leadership coach because we believe mentorship is a powerful tool for learning. So we sat down to ask him why he values engineering mentorship and how he’s approached it most effectively:
4 min read
Why Every Organization Needs Customer Data Infrastructure
When it comes to handling customer data, the list of acronyms for what analysts, product specialists and marketers need is growing—CDP, DMP, CDI … the list goes on. While each tool and category differs, they all have one thing in common: they integrate customer data.
Topics: business intelligence cloud marketing stack metarouter cloud analytics
4 min read
The New MarTech Stack: Building and Buying a Best-of-breed Customer Data Platform in 2021
Originally published by our partners at Lytics.
A few years ago, David Raab’s definition of a customer data platform (CDP) for the Customer Data Platform Institute was a reasonable enough starting point to understand its purpose.
Topics: Business (Demo) cdi customer data infrastructure cdp
11 min read
How to Make the Most Out of Amplitude
Developments in data collection and analysis methods have enabled marketers to create highly tailored experiences to increase customer acquisition, involvement, and retention.
Today, data collection tools are much more accurate and able to capture the essence of personalized communication at the most fundamental level.
Topics: integrations amplitude
6 min read
Kubernetes: A Brief History
Recently, I presented an overview on Kubernetes: what it is and why it got willed into existence in the first place. This is the first step in a series of deep-dive Kubernetes presentations he has planned. If you’re exploring Kubernetes as an option—or you love it and want to learn more—let’s start with understanding “why.”
Topics: Compliance enterprise Data Security Kubernetes
2 min read
Gaining An End-to-end Understanding of The Customer Journey
“MetaRouter allows us to set a higher standard and expectation of what we know about our users. Our Product Squads not only make better-informed decisions but also communicate more accurate results to all our stakeholders.” -Ignacio Colino, Growth ICT Business Analyst at Pet Circle
Topics: Flexibility data accuracy data storage centralized data
3 min read
How Princess Auto Transformed Their Customer Experience
“With MetaRouter, we found that we could map every part of the customer journey once and link to all of the different data streams we needed. Everyone in the company uses it, sometimes without even realizing it.” -Dave Matthes, Senior Leader of Customer Communication
Topics: data accuracy metarouter cloud customer experience
3 min read
Centralized Data for Better Analytics and Faster Growth
“We started from a place of disparate data,” says Rusty Bickel, Crossroads’ Data Officer. “MetaRouter makes it simple for us to track important user behavior while maintaining complete flexibility for our communications, analytics and other teams to autonomously use the tools they needed.”
Topics: Data Security data accuracy data storage metarouter cloud centralized data
3 min read
Tumblbug Deeply Understands Users While Optimizing Resources
“We migrated from Segment when we realized that MetaRouter allows us to minimize the resources we’re spending yet continue to make fully informed decisions as a company.” -Jaeseung Yum, CEO of Tumblbug
For independent content creators, success—if not survival—depends on funding projects and building a fan base. But when Jaeseung Yum was a film major in college, he realized there was no clear path to generating support. To solve that problem, he founded Tumblbug, a Korean online crowdfunding site.
Topics: Business (Demo) data accuracy data storage metarouter cloud
5 min read
Veterans in Tech: The Transition, the Similarities and Transferable Skills
As the United States celebrates and reflects on Veteran's Day 2020, all of us at MetaRouter are incredibly grateful for the sacrifices that active, inactive and fallen military members have made for our country.
The MetaRouter team is fortunate enough to have an Air Force veteran working alongside us. So, we decided to sit down with our very own Val Kautz, a former Air Force Staff Sergeant and current Product Engineer for MetaRouter, to chat about her own story and maybe help Veterans looking to venture into the tech space along the way.
Topics: Technology engineering Veterans
9 min read
How to Make the Most Out of Mixpanel
Detailed data allows marketers to create precise segments and a 360° view of customers to target them more granularly and connect with them on a deeper level.
To be able to leverage your data assets, it is critical to have access to a depth and breadth of accurate and reliable data.
Topics: Flexibility cloud metarouter cloud mixpanel integrations
2 min read
How to Build Learning Apps for Kids While Following Regulations
When Apple announced new regulations, HOMER Learning’s entire product model was put in jeopardy:
“At first, it looked like we were completely cut off from working with any third-party tool,” says Ripal Sanghani, Senior Product Manager.
That meant no more marketing analytics, product analytics, even data storage.
Topics: Compliance Data Security martech children's app
5 min read
The Power of MongoDB Atlas Data Lake
When looking at big data storage options for big business, almost all options fall into two categories: data warehouses and data lakes. The latter has been rising in popularity and MongoDB has risen to the occasion of providing a way to implement, manage, and mine these structures with their own framework: MongoDB Atlas Data Lake.
Topics: Flexibility Data Security data lake data storage
2 min read
CaliberMind Unlocks 2x Growth for Their Customers
CaliberMind, an analytics platform for marketers and revenue teams, optimizes pipeline and revenue growth for B2B marketers.
“As a startup, we have finite engineering resources but an ambitious product roadmap,” says Nic Zangre, Revenue Operations Executive and Marketing Jedi Master of CaliberMind, “Getting the data right and delivered on time, consistently, is paramount for earning customer’s trust in their reporting.”
Topics: Flexibility data accuracy data storage metarouter cloud
8 min read
CDP vs. DMP vs. CDI: A Guide
In a competitive market dominated by data-driven marketers, the success of your marketing strategy depends on your ability to leverage customer data effectively.
Topics: Flexibility Data Security
4 min read
Why We Adopted An SRE Approach
From the beginning, we knew that a complicated, distributed system like MetaRouter is going to need some serious monitoring. Sure, you can usually see if a message isn't delivered to its destination, but with a microservice architecture processing millions of messages a day (and scaling fast), it's extremely important to have insight into the guts of the system.
Topics: Flexibility data engineering Data Security engineering
5 min read
The Best Way to Manage Tags Might Not Be A Tag Manager
Tags have been around since the 90s, but they are more relevant than ever for businesses. They provide companies with valuable insights into the habits, preferences, and demographics of their customer base. Tags—or the marketing tools they enable, rather—allow businesses to create a better customer experience and make informed decisions.
Topics: data warehousing seo optimization Data Security data accuracy tag management
9 min read
A Digital Marketing Playbook for E-commerce
E-commerce has been growing rapidly and playing an increasingly larger role in the consumer experience. In fact, by 2021 more than ¼ of the world’s population, some 2.14 billion people, will be shopping online. Their online purchases will account for nearly 20% of retail sales worldwide. Some experts predict that this number will increase to more than 95% by 2040.
Add to these figures the changes in consumer behaviors and preferences brought about by the sudden and rapid spread of COVID-19 and it is easy to see the massive opportunity for e-commerce retailers.
Topics: Business (Demo) cloud Page Optimization marketing stack
8 min read
How to Build Your Marketing Stack
“Everything changes, and nothing stands still.” -Heraclitus
We’ve all been forced to deal with a lot of changes in the last few months, and there are certainly more to come. But as we’ve hastily adapted to new ways of working, this may actually be a good time to consider voluntary changes to improve work going forward.
Customers and markets seem to be changing faster than ever; you may find that changing up the marketing tools in your stack will help you keep up.
Topics: Data Security martech adtech marketing stack ecommerce
9 min read
Which Data Storage Solution Do You Need?
Anyone getting serious about data analysis has to get serious about data storage.
We recently wrote about the pros and cons of a data lake, data warehouse, or both. But even once you make that call, there is more research to be done.
Topics: Flexibility Technology Data Security data storage
4 min read
Personal Information: How Secure Is It, Really?
This morning, I woke up to a text from my sister-in-law: “I knew my phone was listening to me... Facebook is giving me all ads for homes in Colorado.”
Last night, we’d met for dinner and I told her that I was moving.
Was her phone listening? Probably not.
Topics: pii Technology data regulation Data Security data privacy
4 min read
The Need for Privacy Standards in Marketing
We recently partnered with Choozle, a programmatic advertising platform, to discuss the phase-out of the third-party cookie.
2 min read
How to Use Marketing Tools While Staying Compliant
Marketing is complicated enough without the headache of compliance.
Doing the job well requires leveraging the right third-party tools, but sending first-party data to external systems adds in more complexity for organizations who need to stay compliant with strict regulations.
Topics: Compliance data regulation Data Security hipaa blueshift
6 min read
Do Our Smart Devices Listen to Us?
Facebook and Instagram can target ads so accurately that some people find it creepy. As Gayle King put it when she interviewed Instagram head Adam Mosseri last October:
“I can be having a private conversation with someone about something I'm interested in seeing or buying... and an advertisement for that will pop up on my Instagram feed. I haven't searched for it, I haven't talked to anybody about it. I swear I think you guys are listening.”
Topics: Security CCPA Data Security GDPR
5 min read
A Closer Look at Cloud Security: AWS vs. Azure vs. GCP
The move from on premises to cloud infrastructure is happening at a rapid pace. Many organizations require the cloud to power application development and to support workloads that traditional data centers can no longer manage. In fact, Gartner expects cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to be a $74 billion industry by 2022.
For many companies, transitioning to cloud is not something that can wait any longer.
Topics: Data Security
3 min read
Is Your Data Accurate?
In some cases, inaccurate data causes no harm or foul. But not usually.
Fortune 500, Healthcare, Finance, and Enterprise corporations actioning—perhaps also monetizing—data must be analyzing accurate, timely, and consistent information. Otherwise, it’s completely unreliable.
Topics: enterprise privacy product server-side data accuracy
2 min read
Big Changes for Attribution Mean Big Changes for Marketers
With the removal of third-party cookies and increasing compliance mandates, marketers can prepare now for big changes to attribution.
Topics: website performance martech marketing stack website optimization
6 min read
Data Lakes vs. Data Warehouses
"Big data" has been the topical buzzword in the tech scene for quite some time now and has an ever-important role to play in the way that technology continues to advance. If you're not already taking advantage of the plentiful insights that your customers' day-to-day transactions and interactions with your brand convey, then we hate to say it, but you're falling behind. Off-the-shelf analytics toolsets like Google Analytics and others offer great data insights to get started, but there comes a time when you need to supercharge your data analysis capabilities.
Topics: data infrastructure data warehousing data data lake data warehouse storing events
3 min read
How to Run An “Innovation Week” To Accelerate Problem-Solving
To close out Q2, we hosted an in-house hack-a-thon as an opportunity to create without constraints and validate ideas. For three days, our engineers broke into teams and began work based on a specific hypothesis. The week culminated in a formal demo—and an internal vote to declare a winner.
Topics: Development (Demo) engineering
4 min read
5 Practical Ways to Boost E-Commerce Growth
Guess how many visitors to e-commerce sites actually make a purchase? Less than three percent. This means that retailers have to maximize every opportunity to increase revenue from current buyers and bring in new customers.
Topics: lower latency website performance website optimization ecommerce
1 min read
The True Impact of Page Load Time
*Photo by Praveen kumar Mathivanan on Unsplash. Infographic is based off of this great article by Viki Green. You can download a PDF to share.
.jpg){kind=link}
Topics: lower latency website performance website optimization
3 min read
Healthcare Marketing for the 21st Century
As most B2C brands are now realizing, customer expectations are changing rapidly. Most businesses are taking steps to thrive in a world where customer experience trends are dominated by giants like Amazon. But these shifts aren’t just happening within the e-commerce space. Any business that serves customers or users will have to adapt to survive in our new reality — most of all are trusted businesses like healthcare providers.
Topics: Data Security martech hipaa
4 min read
Thinking About Building An In-house Data Integration Solution?
Think about NASA.
Topics: Flexibility Security Compliance Technology Data Security GDPR
3 min read
Are you ready for LGPD?
On April 3, 2020, the Brazilian Senate approved a Bill of Law (“PL 1179/2020”), which includes a number of emergency measures intended to address the COVID-19 pandemic.
Of particular interest to us, one provision delays the effective date of the Brazilian Data Protection Law (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais, “LGPD”) until January 2021. Fines and sanctions for companies that fail to comply with the LGPD are now scheduled to become effective August 2021.
Topics: Compliance lgpd
1 min read
The New Martech Era: Advice On The Right Tools And Processes For The New Way We'll Work
Last week, we had the opportunity to join Dan McGaw at Effin Amazing (soon-to-be McGaw.io) for a panel discussion on how to make sure your marketing tech stack stays safe while keeping costs down, especially with the many changes happening in the industry (e.g. the New MarTechEra witnessed hundreds of tools being invested in less).
Topics: martech marketing stack
4 min read
The Hidden Key to Website Optimization
A recent survey by Kissmetrics revealed that 79% of online shoppers unhappy with website performance are less likely to buy from that same site in the future.
Topics: lower latency seo optimization website performance website optimization
2 min read
How A Leading Healthcare Company Stays HIPAA Compliant with MetaRouter
Integrating marketing and analytical tools with HIPAA is no small feat. With regulations around audits, remediation plans, staff training, documentation, formal Business Associate Agreements (BAAs), and even incident plans, HIPAA is one of the most stringent regulations in effect.
8 min read
Data Privacy and Using Location Data to Stop the Spread of COVID-19
In response to the CDC’s approach to fighting COVID-19 through contact tracing, governments and tech companies across the globe are working together to use geo-tracking data to gain insight into the spread of the disease and develop apps to enforce quarantines or identify people who may have been exposed to the virus.
Topics: Data Security data privacy contact tracing
5 min read
4 Recent Healthcare Data Breaches (That Could Have Been Prevented)
Protected health information is arguably the most regulated type of sensitive data around. It’s the only kind of data that has a broad reaching federal law protecting it specifically. The Health Insurance Portability and Protection Act (HIPAA) contains extensive regulations regarding the collection and use of PHI (you can check out our primer on HIPAA here).
Topics: data breaches healthcare hipaa
3 min read
ICYMI: Thrive Don't Just Survive the Stackapocalypse
On Tuesday, March 31, we joined Effin Amazing for a webinar about how marketing teams in any industry can prepare for inevitable upcoming changes. Here’s a description of the webinar and a full recording (with viewer’s guide).
With the crisis of COVID-19 comes the “Stackapocalypse.” In this brave new webinar, Dan discusses what it is and how to thrive—not just survive.
Topics: martech marketing stack COVID-19
4 min read
How to Build a Children's App that Kids Love and Parents Trust
When the two largest mobile app marketplaces (App Store and Google Play), made drastic changes to children’s app development guidelines last year, they left developers unsure of how they could continue to maintain their ad-supported business models. Yet the need to protect children's data is prescient.
4 min read
Advertising Without Third-Party Cookies
It seems like the life of the third-party cookie has finally reached its end. While it has been a staple of digital advertising almost since the advent of the commercial web, the third-party cookie’s power has been slowly chipped away by browser developers, regulators, and consumers.
Topics: martech adtech cookies
6 min read
Three Ways to Gain Consumer Trust
With e-comm accounting for 13.7% of global retail sales in 2019—that’s 3.453 trillion dollars—and rising, companies who step back to embrace the challenges head on will find golden opportunities to keep data safe will be the ones who not only avoid penalties and expensive data breaches, but also increase consumer trust.
Topics: Security Compliance Data Security
4 min read
5 Things To Know in a Post-CCPA World
As of this writing, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) has only been in effect for a few weeks but has already changed the way many companies inside and outside of the Golden State do business.
Topics: Compliance CCPA Page Post Data Security
5 min read
The Ethics of Collecting Consumer Data
Discussions of business use of consumer data often focus on legal issues, like risks and regulations. For good reason: the massive amount of personal information collected by governments and businesses can cause potential harm and huge fines if misused. So much so that newer privacy regulations like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) limit uses of data and seek to give power back to the consumer.
Topics: Security Compliance Data Security
4 min read
Navigating New Regulations for Children's Apps
The year 2019 was a time of reckoning for the industry of children's apps. In February, ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, was hit with a $5.7 million fine from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for illegally collecting names, email addresses, pictures, and the geographic locations of children under 13 in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
Topics: Security Compliance Data Security
6 min read
9 Tools for Better Marketing and Advertising
The digital marketing landscape has become a crowded one. Although the competition might be fierce for users’ attention, the right tools can give you an edge without breaking a sweat.
Although you may be using martech (marketing technology) or adtech (advertising technology), you still might be missing out on valuable markets. Is your engagement down? Do you hear crickets when tuning in to your once-profitable platform?
Topics: Page Optimization martech adtech
6 min read
What’s New in B2B UI/UX Research?
Let's face it: B2B is infamous for a poor user experience (UX).
Many companies fear that changing their applications and websites will anger their current customers. To be fair, users usually don't take to change very well. Many also assume that B2B and B2C sales and marketing are fundamentally different. While websites and applications are part of the sales process, B2B sales typically don't begin and end by one visit to an eCommerce site.
Topics: Flexibility Page Optimization
5 min read
Is Your Data Compliant with HIPAA?
Perhaps more than any other industry, healthcare must be a leader in securing personal information. Breaches happen, and healthcare information is perhaps most sensitive. The amount of information that healthcare providers, payers, and adjacent entities collect on individuals is vast and includes not just medical information, but also financial and personally-identifying data.
Topics: Compliance Data Security
5 min read
The Impact of Data Regulations on Adtech
If you’ve spent any amount of time on the public internet, you’ve encountered adtech. The underlying technology responsible for ads that follow you across the web and appear at the top of your search results is becoming a larger and more important industry every day.
Adtech is, of course, fueled by data. In an age where increased data collection is the norm, and concerns about privacy and security are on the rise, we thought it would be useful to take a deeper dive into this industry.
Topics: Compliance CCPA Page Post Data Security
5 min read
The Impact of Data Regulations on Martech
We have spent some time on this blog discussing data privacy, security, and the regulations around how business can use personal information. While we have focused mostly on the highly-regulated industries of healthcare and finance, we thought it was important to spend some time discussing two industries that are growing in scale and importance—marketing and advertising tech.
Topics: Compliance CCPA Page Post Data Security
6 min read
Why We Love Kafka's Open Source Data Pipelines
Apache Kafka is a popular choice for organizations that need to collect, move, and store large amounts of data. In fact, more than a third of the Fortune 500 companies use Kafka, including PayPal, Microsoft, and Uber.
In addition to top tech companies adopting Kafka, it's gaining popularity among organizations that are usually slow to adopt new technology.
So why is it taking enterprises by storm?
Topics: Flexibility engineering
7 min read
Is Tag Bloat Hurting Your Business?
Tags go by a lot of different names in the tech world. Trackers, beacons, and pixels all mean the same thing: a snippet of code added to a site to collect and send information.
Easy to set up, they provide important information for the website owners and their third parties, enabling companies to give users the personalized experience that they have come to expect.
However, the very thing that companies use to help grow their business could actually be chasing their customers away.
Topics: lower latency tag bloat seo optimization website performance Page Optimization
5 min read
Three Sectors That Benefited Most from Business Intelligence Software
Would you take out your car for a drive in the middle of the night knowing your headlights are busted? Probably not. They are essential for visibility and navigating the road without putting your car and yourself at serious risk. Business intelligence provides guidance in much the same way.
Topics: Flexibility data infrastructure business intelligence
6 min read
Server-Side Streaming for the Security Conscious
In the late 90s, businesses became aware that they could track their customers’ data with JavaScript tags. The revolution of data tracking began. As the Internet grew, companies could get better insight into their users’ preferences and shopping habits. They can now understand their customers better than ever. They can even figure out when their customers are pregnant—before their own families.
Topics: Security data infrastructure reliability server-side
7 min read
Taking a Closer Look at the Data: PII
With every week there seems to be another story about a data breach or a company being held accountable for a previous one. States and jurisdictions are racing to put laws on the books to protect consumer privacy and/or mitigate damage of data exposure.
But what data are these laws protecting?
Topics: Security Compliance personal data pii data data regulation
5 min read
Three Major Players Moving Away from Client-Side Tags
Since the late 90s, if a company wanted to know more about their virtual users, tags were the way to go. However, that’s all starting to change.
Client-side tags are falling out of favor in a significant way. With the rise of smartphones, legislation over data, and the emphasis on customer experience, tags can’t keep up with modern e-commerce. Instead, companies are starting to lean on server-side data to get the information that they need.
Topics: Security page optimizations tag governance server-side Page Optimization
5 min read
CCPA: Where We Go From Here
We’ve spent some time on this blog discussing the intricacies of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and how companies should prepare for its start in January 2020. An equally important exercise is looking to the future of not just CCPA, but data privacy laws more broadly. It’s likely that CCPA will be just the first of multiple data privacy laws in the United States, and this potential patchwork of state laws may spur the federal government to develop a nationwide standard.
Topics: Compliance forecasting CCPA data regulation
10 min read
White Paper: Why Fret Cloud Vendor Lock-In and How to Avoid It
The decision to transition to the cloud can bring multiple benefits to your company. From efficiency to flexibility to cost-effectiveness, more businesses are turning to Cloud Service Providers (CSP) to harness its advantages. In fact, 83% of enterprise workload will be in the cloud by 2020.
Topics: Flexibility infrastructure cloud white paper vendor lock-in
5 min read
Are You Ready For CCPA?
We’re less than six months away from when the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) will take effect. On January 1, 2020 more than half a million US-based companies will be subject to the California law meant to give consumers more control over their personal information.
Topics: Compliance CCPA data regulation
6 min read
Comparing Cloud Providers: AWS vs. Azure vs. GCP
In a little over a decade, the cloud went from a new buzzword and fascinating concept to indispensable for business. In fact, by 2020, it's predicted that 67% of enterprise infrastructure will be cloud-based, and 82% of the workload will reside on the cloud.
Topics: Flexibility data engineering cloud providers dev engineering
5 min read
CCPA: What You Need to Know about California’s New Privacy Regulations
Digital privacy rights have been a growing point of activism among consumers, legislators, and civil liberties experts. In recent years, protests and petitions have morphed into actual laws. In 2016, the European Union passed the General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR)—the first major law addressing data protection and privacy. It went into effect in May 2018.
While there is no federal equivalent of GDPR in the United States, a growing number of states and municipalities are passing their own laws that address data privacy and security in some fashion. So far, only California has passed legislation that could be considered on a par with GDPR.
Topics: Compliance CCPA data regulation
3 min read
Why Modularity and Where to Start
Through years of partnering with clients and integrating our solutions into their existing tools, we’ve always found that a bit of flexibility can go a long way. That’s why we’ve built the upcoming Enterprise Edition of our streaming platform to have removable pieces. We know that there is never a one-size fits all solution when it comes to data needs, and it forces our own product team into some great practices to ensure that we support all of the edge cases we allow.
Topics: Flexibility enterprise infrastructure systems product engineering
8 min read
Why We Love GraphQL
Introduced to the public in 2015, GraphQL came out of Facebook as the query language to power their transitioning of the mobile interfaces from web-based to native applications. Since then, it's been adopted by GitHub, Pinterest, Shopify and others to power their APIs.
The reason? There are many things that set GraphQL apart from RESTful APIs, but the main difference is that the requester has more control over exactly which parts of the response they want. Control and flexibility matter to us.
Topics: graphql product dev engineering
8 min read
Security Primer for Startups and Small Businesses
With issues around security and compliance being launched to the forefront of businesses' minds, our team decided it was time to not only evaluate our practice, but also the process around the practice. Thankfully one of our all-star engineers, Kailyn, has an extensive background in the study.
Pulling from her experience working with teams small and large on high-profile financial data security projects among others, she lays out how to take this process from the back to the driver's seat. Organizations of all sizes have the imperative to shore up their systems, but it does not need to be mysterious or agonizing...read on!
Topics: Security risk management basics
13 min read
Five Key Takeaways from the Congressional Hearing on Data Privacy
Living in the internet age, it is incredibly easy to take for granted the great magnitude of how this digital world has touched every aspect of daily life. Not that this is surprising, after all, what choice do people have? Not to engage with the internet means being left in the dust of a bygone era. Yet there is something mythical about its nature; it is communicated with by a relatively scant crowd of technological oracles, yet its impact is of a scale that would make even the Olympian pantheon jealous.
Topics: Compliance
7 min read
Our Journey with Proprietary, Inflexible Systems
Sometimes you need to play the short-game and roll out a solution to test its viability. When time is money, and you’re short on both, specific and ready-built solutions are a great way to get there in a hurry.
But if you are going for growth and the economies of scale, it’s worth the effort to plan ahead and look down the road. It can help prevent large cost and potential churn during the phase in your business when your client base is most critical.
Topics: Flexibility data infrastructure modularity vendor lock-in AWS
15 min read
Normalizing Data for Warehouse Centralization
A very common initiative these days is data warehouse centralization across an organization. DWaaS (data warehouse as a service) has become commoditized to the point that organizations of every size can begin setting up a reporting infrastructure starting at only a couple hundred dollars a month. This is really exciting and, when copying data from other structured databases, a relatively simple process.
Topics: Flexibility Guides data engineering data warehousing big data
8 min read
Intruder Alert! Top Five Data Breaches this Decade
Data breaches seem to be on the rise in number and scope over the past decade, and it is increasingly likely that you have or someone you know has been affected by one. Being particularly invested in the future of the data-scape, our team was curious to go back and reflect on some of the high profile leaks that have pervaded the 2010s. Following is our roundup of five of the most impactful data catastrophes we researched, with a nice metric system to categorize our choices.
Topics: Security data breaches personal data
10 min read
Translating Real-World Randomness To Create Digital Security
Or, how I used a deck of cards to protect my data.
Every year, our data becomes more accessible as the world is increasingly interconnected and more services we depend on become available online. This allows for ease that was unimaginable just twenty years ago. You can bank, apply for a mortgage and credit cards, share personal photos, store important documents and get a real-time view into your home at any time.
Topics: Security personal data
4 min read
Why Every Data Scientist Needs A Data Engineer
The data scientist was deemed the “sexiest job of the 21st century.” The Harvard Business Review reasons that this “hybrid of data hacker, analyst, communicator and trusted adviser” is a rare combination of skills, worth a high paycheck.
Too good to be true? Yes, according to Forbes. Turns out, data scientists spend most of their time (up to 79%!) on the part of their job they hate most.
Topics: Flexibility data engineering data science romance
3 min read
Flexibility: Our Philosophy
Be agile. Be adaptable. Be flexible. In today's climate, these axioms, while wise, are beginning to become more and more cliché. Industries are changing at unprecedented rates, so hearing "be adaptable" is much like hearing mom reiterate the importance of good grades. The need is self-evident, but the task can be gargantuan.