Datastream Connexion
The Cloud Application and Cloud Security Expert

The journey of Datastream Connexion dates back to the time before cloud-based web applications became a trend. According to Eric Hoffman, President of Datastream Connexion, the need to help businesses migrate from traditional systems to cloud systems led to the inception of the company. With deep experience in driving technologies from idea through development, testing, refinement, and launch, Datastream Connexion’s goal is to connect people and data.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Hoffman elucidates on some of the exciting insights about his organization, its unique value proposition, and roadmap for the future.

Challenges

In the beginning, there were significant challenges, especially concerning ‘migration’ of applications and data from traditional systems to the cloud. Helping companies realize the need for migrating to cloud systems and taking them out of their comfort zone of the traditional data center was one of the biggest challenges that we faced. But as time passed, we were able to convince our customers to move to a cloud platform like AWS by assisting them with application migration, data security, and compliance.

Migrating to the cloud offers cost advantages and operational agility, but it also brings to the table security, compliance, and data privacy solutions for business. That is why we prefer AWS, as Amazon is a large organization with ever evolving platform initiatives, and can ensure security and compliance with its substantial resources. Also, at our company, we employ third-party auditors to check if the services we offer are compliant. We spend a lot of internal time discussing the engineering and management challenges to help organizations cooperatively work toward securing data.

Solutions and Services

Developing SaaS or mobile applications is only the tip of the iceberg of what we do. Besides this, we manage the AWS cloud workload on behalf of all the applications that we build for our clients. Thinking about the migration path, we help shift our client’s systems from ‘monolithic applications’ to cloud architecture, for example, leveraging microservices rather than single, large virtualized servers. We complete this migration while ensuring security and data privacy.

The tremendous stakeholder support that we receive for our solutions and services is due to the trust and partnership established during the migration journey. We treat each customer as unique and try to understand their unique goals. We follow an empirical, repeatable approach to migrate database and applications overtime to extract the highest value. Once we have established the trust with our clients through initial implementations, we discuss further options related to the resiliency and the different services enabled by cloud adoption. Critical to cloud adoption or application modernization is to ensure clients are comfortable and engaged, so they are empowered to inform and show progress and project success to their superiors.

Compliance and Security

Security has always been of utmost importance to us since the very beginning. To this end, we develop systems that restrict public use of data. We look at security and compliance as a holistic solution and take aggressive stands to ensure data privacy. We work closely with our partners and support each other to address challenges growing in the cloud infrastructure.

For instance, in the federal sector, there are multiple agencies, and often it is a challenge to find data or information as agencies act as silos and cannot have access to others. Understanding this, we created a platform in AWS to improve the data privacy while providing granular data access to the required data from a common pool. We have built a model that leverages the different components of AWS in one compliant, secure data exchange to help secure the food supply.

Staying Ahead of the Competition

Because we have security and compliance engrained in our culture, we are focused on helping organizations understand how to migrate to the cloud with more security and privacy. We offer expanded data protection for people across the globe in full support of personal data privacy and GDPR. Not only are we a company who knows how to migrate applications but are proud to be one that ensures compliance and privacy. We understand the larger picture that our client’s customers need to have trust in their solutions, and the need to keep ahead of the competition. Hence we help future-proof our clients through horizon planning and continually realign and expand the offerings that we provide.

In the Future

We are currently working to protect food supply ensuring that people have safe food to eat, which is helping people at a very macro level. Now we are looking to go micro and help people in very personal ways growing into areas of human healthcare. Our customers will continue to be a mix of startups and mid-large-sized enterprises helping them build natively in or migrate to cloud infrastructure while creating compelling, engaging experiences. In the upcoming months, animal health will be an additional focus area at Datastream Connexion.

Despite the experience of working with different industries, we have intentionally remained a small, nimble company and have continually focused on becoming ‘cloud specialists.’ Above all, customer satisfaction is what we work for; typically once we have a client approach us with their needs, we ensure those are seamlessly met which explains our average client relationship spanning nine years.