 Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2018. brought to you by Informatica. Hey, welcome back everyone. Live here in Las Vegas, this is theCUBE's coverage of Informatica World 2018. I'm John Furrier, Coast theCUBE, with Peter Burris, my co-host for the next two days. Chris Voidak, who's the production architect at Simcore, a Canadian leading financial processing services provider. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, great to be here guys. So first, explain about one minute what the company does in your role. Yeah, so Simcore was formed by the three largest banks in Canada. Over 20 years ago, we have a proven ability to work effectively as a utility service structure type of model. Simcore is the leading business processing and client communications provider in Canada, supporting banks, telecommunications, insurance, and retail companies in Canada. And your role there is to do what? Wow, deployments, data deployments, be specific. Yeah, specifics. One of the things that I work on is strategic initiatives. Everything from data-driven architectures to the strategies where we want to take the company and how does technology line up to the business needs. Essentially, I'm a senior architect in the office of the CTO. So what's your data look like? I mean, obviously, you're an Informatica customer. Are you happy with Informatica? And are they helping you out? And tell us about what's going on there. Anybody who knows me will know that I'm a pretty blunt guy. So when I say this, I do mean it, is Informatica has done tremendous things for us. Their products actually just work. It's very easy to get value out of our data using Informatica. Our time to market has decreased from months to weeks, what though? So we're extremely happy with the maturity of their products and services that we get from them. So as you think about the role that the architecture, the architect has played, and you being a good example of that, the architect used to be the individual that would look at the physical assets and how you thought about the physical access should be put together in response to a known process. Correct. And a known application. And now as you mentioned, a data-first orientation requires thinking about the arrangement of assets that have to be architected around very differently. Absolutely. How has the role of architecture changed? Certainly where you are, but in the response to this notion of data-first. Yeah, so one of the biggest challenges that we have is, how do we ethically use that data for fraud prevention and detection purposes? Because that's one of the key areas that we're trying to grow is one of our key initiatives, which is digital and data services. And where we struggle with that is, how do we effectively use our data? So we worked with, you know, I mean with our internal teams, like our privacy and data governance teams, to come up with a data governance policy, comprehensive one at that. How do we ethically use this data now for our services? That's the biggest thing that's changed, as opposed to just taking our process and gluing it together. How can you use that without breaking laws and things like that? That's the biggest change I've seen. And what's the relationship between architecture, data architecture, or architecture generally, and the role that security's playing? We have a feeling that because data can be shared, because it can be copied, because it can be moved, privatizing that data is essential to any business strategy, and security historically has played a major role in thinking about how we privatize data. How does security fit into that governance, ethical kind of model? Yeah, and we are a security first type of company over anything else a lot of times. We're, they definitely have a seat at the table. We've had to deploy certain things, I'm not sure if you've heard of, like format preserving encryption, architectures, and techniques to help enable not only to satisfy data governance, but to drive value legally to our businesses and our clients. How do you look at data as a platform, and how is your data laid out? You made a comment earlier, which I liked, which was, Informatica product just works. We've been covering them for a few years. One of the things that got my attention was, horizontally scaling the data across systems, not just a point product. It's more of a platform. How, from your standpoint, do you look at platforms for you? As you replatform with data, you are digitizing a lot of services, you're actually enabling new services. What is it about the data platform, and how are you guys thinking about it? What we're thinking about it, how do we manage data in a centralized spot, and deliver microservices on top of that data in one spot? Like how do we, because we can't afford to have data in a million data warehouses, or sporadically throughout the organization. It's not an effective use of data. So that we try to structure it is, we, as soon as we get the data in, we keep it in one spot, which in our case would be, let's say, a Hadoop cluster, fully encrypted using format preserving encryption as our mechanism to securing the data. And then from there, we're running microservices on top of our Hadoop stack powered by Informatica to drive value out of that data. And where the biggest bang for our buck a lot of times is, is that, you know, we have old mainframe data files, structured data that's hard to parse and deal with. Well, we can store it in Hadoop, save the space because it's highly compressed, like X9 or Epsidic, use Informatica to just get at it in a matter of minutes to drive value in weeks versus months in a traditional model. Talk about the microservices architecture, because that's kind of a methodology. Kind of a mindset. Is it like the classic cloud Kubernetes containers? Are you thinking about more of endpoint APIs? Talk about how you define microservices. Yeah, so microservices where we've leveraged microservices is essentially in our new development models where we're utilizing Node.js and React, single-page application development, where we have it since the front end is talking to microservices delivering on a specific need only. And then we're leveraging things like eventually Kubernetes in the back end where we deploy those microservices, but we're dealing with it from a single-page application perspective, really the more modern web development approaches. So you're bringing data into the application via microservices, so you can have the centralized location. Microservices handles the interaction and into the application. Right, and which also, we had to rework the security infrastructure and approach to it, because we couldn't use the old school, let's say J-Session Cookie, now we're using token-based authentication, all new challenges there, right? Yeah, I love it, we're at a data show, we're talking Kubernetes and orchestration containers, microservices. But that's what technology is good for, right? That's what I'm saying, it's great. I want to push you on this. So today, Simcore provides, as you said, this enormous facility for looking up past banking transactions or past banking statements for a driver from banks in Canada. But I presume you're looking at providing new services in the future. I can imagine that a centralized resource for a human being looking up an old banking statement where you got four or five seconds to get the job done is probably pretty good. But when you start talking about potentially maybe moving to fraud detection or some other types of services, does that start to change the way you think about your data architecture? Because now you're doing something that's much more close to real time. How's that going to affect the way you think about things? Oh, we've been on a journey, right? On a digital data transformation journey, literally at Simcore because of that. We started off with some in-house built solutions that we have actually patterns on on how to properly warehouse data. We have one of the largest Canada data warehouses for check images that got 2.6 petabytes in Canada. And we had to somehow, how do we drive value out of it? This has a data warehouse type of mentality solution. How do we drive value? So how do we move it now into the more of the Hadoop, the Cassandra's world to get that real time in batch processing to get insights and how do we do it ethically as well, right? And secure, how do we secure? Those are the three biggest things that we have to look at in our journey to get there. Hasn't been easy because of different paradigms, different understanding of it. So let me make sure I get that. New technologies to reduce the response times. Correct. Ethical use of the data. And secure control and evidence of the data. Correct, to protect it, yes. So how is that changing then? Are you going to, do you see it staying centralized? Do you see it becoming, moving some of the data, some of the responses out closer to some of your banks who are actually doing the fraud detection? Well, we see it, because we're trying to get into the space and do it on their behalf because we have that overarching kind of look at it. So how do we just do it ethically, right? So when some of our owner banks, for example, send us data, well, we can provide services overarching to provide insights across the board. Something that they cannot, as they do on their own without our help. Real quick, to find data ethics, as you mentioned, ethics many times. You mean securely, anonymized, what does that mean for you? Well, to me, it means like that old, back in the 20 years ago, for example, I would take my wallet and maybe put in a vault and my vault are at home physically protected, it's safe. Well, how do I protect that data now, not only from potentially breaches, but how do I protect to make sure my privacy isn't at risk? Someone's not using it for improper use, things like that. That's how I define ethical use, right? What are you doing now that you couldn't do before? So we're seeing this awesome cloud, you mentioned Kubernetes gets pumped up because that's kind of a horizontal, this orchestration, you talk about multi-cloud, these are things that are coming into sight with those kinds of technologies. There's an old way and there's a new way, right? So we're seeing this transformation. What's different now for you that you couldn't do before? Yeah, before it was hard to drive insights because we didn't have the scalability, horizontally or vertically, so things like Hadoop, Informatica on Hadoop, the way we can scale our web applications down with microservices, that's what's made the big difference is the techniques that are being developed to get down to real-time processing, get the answer quicker and faster and drive value to our clients faster. And what's really important is when they move to digital channels, fraud becomes a problem, it's growing in incidents and complexity. We see an opportunity now where we can provide this fraud detection and prevention services as they change and go digital channels, and we're there for the right type of thing. Chris, this is a great interview. I'd love to follow up with you and learn more about your environment. Final question, heard you got the Informatica Innovation Award Honoree. Yes. Congratulations. Thank you. Advice to other folks doing cutting-edge stuff that might be interested in that kind of status. Yeah, words of advice there would be, try to push the limits. Never give up, try to push the limits on the design patterns and design approaches. You'd be amazed at what you can achieve if you really push those limits. Great story, love what you guys are doing out of Canada and Toronto area. Chris, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate your stories. The CUBE Live coverage here in Las Vegas for Informatica World 2018. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris. We'll be back after this short break.