How a Data As Infrastructure™ Approach Optimizes Business Outcomes

It has become as important to organizations as physical infrastructure like buildings and electrical systems. Data is vital to decision-making, profitability, productivity and impacts many other drivers of business success.

As a result, the choice of infrastructure is critical to unlock the potential of data to maximize business outcomes and technology investments. Not all workloads operate efficiently in the same environment. Depending on who is using the applications, how often users are accessing them and what kind of latency the applications can tolerate, they could be ideally suited to the public cloud, a private cloud or on-premises.

At Aptum, we call this our Data As Infrastructure^TM approach. Recently, our CEO and President Susan Bowen discussed with B2B News Network why it is critical for organizations to shift to a more data-centric approach.

In a previous blog, we covered some of the basics of Data As Infrastructure^TM — what it means and the benefits it can bring to organizations. Now, we’ll illustrate how the concept of Data As Infrastructure^TM actually works in practice. These examples demonstrate the importance of first identifying your data workflows and then deciding the optimal place for those workflows.

Case 1: Shifting to Cloud-Native

A large media company was expanding its portfolio of stations and growing its audience. The firm had been hosting its own infrastructure but realized it needed a new solution to ensure its content was always available.

Given its evolving needs, the company decided to switch to a public cloud infrastructure that included around-the-clock monitoring, 24×7 security and managed services. The firm realized its application would perform better in the public cloud but they needed their current hosted environment and future environment to coexist, while the team migrated the data to the cloud.

Aptum’s hybrid solution was designed to integrate the company’s hosted infrastructure with the public cloud and help manage its data migration securely. Regardless of where the critical data resided, it had to be treated as the top priority, ensuring it would be secure and available when needed. The result was an infrastructure that gave the media company higher reliability, better security, protection against distributed-denial-of-service attacks and a superior experience for its customers.

Case 2: Building for Speed

A company that sells a programmatic digital advertising platform to ad agencies needed a partner who could provide state-of-the-art hardware and a blazingly fast network. In the world of programmatic ad buying, speed is vital. Millions of transactions happen in milliseconds and any delay can result in lost buying opportunities or increased costs for ad agencies and their clients. Data is the heart of this company’s business and it needed an infrastructure that was optimized around its data requirements.

To support its programmatic platform, the company chose a managed services offering from Aptum because it included fast, robust hardware capable of supporting billions of near-real time transactions. The company has been thrilled with the performance of the solution, which allows it to offer a best-in-class product to its customers.

Case 3: Seeking Scale and Security

A sharing platform, designed to ease collaboration among researchers, needed a complex infrastructure that could support millions of scientists from around the world. With more than one million shared projects, the platform’s users generate and share a lot of data. Ensuring that data is stored safely and can be accessed by appropriate researchers securely, was critical to this company’s business.

Aptum built a complex private cloud environment for the company. The infrastructure encompasses high-performance computing, big data analytics, an immense amount of storage and machine learning — everything the company needed to keep up with its rapid growth. With its technology solution in place, the company has continued to contribute to significant advancements in scientific research.

Prioritize Your Data Needs

Although these three companies operate in distinctly different industries, they had one thing in common – they prioritized their use of the data over everything else with a strategy-first approach. They built their infrastructures around their data needs – how it was being captured, managed and used – allowing them to make the best use of their technology investments and deliver solid business outcomes, by putting the right data, on the right cloud, for the right reasons. This is a strategy any organization can adopt to optimize business outcomes and as enterprises continue to manage and optimize their workloads, a Data As Infrastructure approach will be increasingly crucial to success.