MODERNIZING YOUR DATA INFRASTRUCTURE
Business imperatives for
modernizing data infrastructure
Michael Gabriel
Partner, Fortium Partners
Data has become a strategic asset and a catalyst
for launching new business models, revenue opportuni-
ties, and other innovations. Nasdaq, for example, built
out its portfolio of financial data and analytics services
over the past decade to meet changing customer de-
mands. That wouldn't have been possible without mov-
ing much of its existing data infrastructure to the cloud.
In particular, customer demand for real-time data has
helped drive the organization's digital transformation.
"Being able to get financial updates in real time is
becoming table stakes," says Michael O'Rourke, Senior
Vice President and Head of AI/Technology, Investment
Intelligence at Nasdaq. "For trading applications, being
able to visualize the analytics and assess the risk re-
quires that you have real-time data in many cases."
Innovation takes many forms, including reducing risk
for organizations and their customers. NuData Security,
a Mastercard company, offers fraud-detection solutions
to help banks, insurance companies, e-commerce sites
and other businesses thwart unauthorized access and
account-takeover attempts. Its NuDetect service analyzes
and correlates petabytes of data each day, mitigating
what amounts to millions of attacks daily.
Built in 2008 in a private data center, NuDetect
migrated gradually to the public cloud to support its
growing data and performance needs. Today, NuDetect
runs exclusively on AWS cloud infrastructure, using a
combination of machine learning and sophisticated
rules engines to filter out malicious behaviors with
minimal impact on legitimate users.
"Data is in an Amazon S3 data lake and everything
just flows from one place to another," says Justine
Fox, Director of Software Engineering at NuData. The
environment frees NuData teams to focus on feature
additions, cost optimizations, and other value-added
activities, Fox says.
Becoming more data-driven is at the heart of digital trans-
formation and business reinvention, and CIOs need to
view it as a continuous exercise, not a point-in-time project.
"First and foremost, you need to be business-driven
before you're data-driven," says Michael Gabriel, a
Partner at Fortium Partners who has held CIO and IT
executive positions at HBO, the National Basketball
Association, and EMI Records. "Digital transformation
isn't a goal, it's a process through which you can better
achieve a goal. Technology doesn't stand still—and
neither does business—so digital transformation is
always ongoing and dynamic."
3
"Technology
doesn't stand
still—and neither
does business—
so digital
transformation
is always ongoing
and dynamic."
