>> Announcer: 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 co-host of theCUBE with Peter Burris, my co-host for the next two days. Chris Wojdak who's the Production Architect at Symcor, a Canadian leading financial processing services provider. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, great to be here, guys. >> So first explain, about in one minute, what the company does and your role. >> Yeah, so Symcor 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. Symcor is a leading business processing and client communications provider in Canada, supporting banks, telecommunications, insurance, and retail companies in Canada. >> John: And your role there is to do what? Deployment of data, deployment? 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 do we, how does the technology line up to the business needs. Such that I'm a Senior Architect in the office as a 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 what's the, tell us about, tell us what's going on. >> 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 with them. 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, that the architecture's played, and you being a, 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 assets should be put together in response to a known process, >> Chris: Correct. >> and a known application. And now, as you mention, 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 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 'cause that's one of the key areas that we're trying to grow as 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 work with our internal teams, like our privacy and data governance teams to come up with a data governance policy, a 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 see. >> 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, 'cause 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. They definitely have a seat at the table. We've had to deploy certain things, I'm not sure if you heard of format preserving encryption architectures and techniques to help enable not only to satisfy the 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 products 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, >> Chris: Exactly. >> more of a platform. How, from your standpoint, do you look at platforms for you? As you re-platform 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? >> Well, when 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? 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 the way we've tried to structure it is as soon as we get the data in, we keep it in one spot, which in our case would be the Tera Hadoop cluster. Fully encrypted using format preserving encryption as our mechanism to securing the data. And then from there, running microservices on top of our Hadoop stack power byte Informatica, to drive value out of that data. And where the biggest bang for our buck a lot of times is is that, mainly we have old mainframe data file structured data that's hard to parse and deal with. Well, we can store it in Hadoop, save the space, 'cause it's highly compressed, like X9 or EBCDIC, 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, or you think of it more of endpoint APIs, talk about how you define microservices. >> Yeah, so microservices, where we've leveraged microservices is essentially in our in our new development models where we're utilizing node.js, and react, single page application development, where we have this in the front end just talking to microservice, specifically, delivering on a specific need only. And then we're leveraging things like, for instance, Kubernetes in the backend, where we deploy those microservices, but we're dealing with it from a single page application perspective, really the more modern web development approach is. >> So you're bringin' data into the application, via microservices, so you can have the centralized location, microservices handles the interaction, and it inputs that into the application? >> Right, and then which also, we have to rework the security infrastructure, and approach to it, because we couldn't use the old school, let's see, Jade session, cookie, now we're using token-based authentication, and all these challenges there, right? >> Hey, I love it, we're at a data show, and we're talkin' Kubernetes, and orchestration containers, and microservices, and it's awesome. (laughing) (Chris laughing) >> But that's what those, that's what those technologies are deployed for, right? >> I know, I'm just saying, it's great! >> But I want to push you on this. >> Chris: Yeah, sure. >> So, today, Symcor provides, as you said, a, this enormous facility for looking up past banking transactions or past banking statements for a variety of different 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, well you got, four, five seconds to get the job done, it's probably pretty good. But when you start talking about, maybe moving to fraud detection, or some other types of services, does that start to change the way you think about your data architecture? 'Cause now you're doing something that's much more close to real-time, how's that going to effect the way you think about things? >> Oh, it was a, we've been on a journey, right? On a digital data transformation journey, literally at Symcor because of that. We started off with some in-house built solutions that we have actually patents on, on how to properly warehouse data. We have one of the largest Canada data warehouses for check images, like a 2.6 petabytes in Canada, and we have to somehow, how do we drive value out of this as a data warehouse type of mentality solution, how do we drive value? So how do we move now into more of the Hadoop, the Cassandra's world, to get that real-time batch processing and get insights, and how do we do that 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, 'cause different paradigms, different understandings-- >> So let me make sure I got that, new technologies to reduce the response times, ethical use of the data, >> The data. >> and secure control in reference to the data? >> Correct, to protect it, yes. >> So how is that changing then, how you think, 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, 'cause we're trying to get into this space, and do it on their behalf because, we have that overarching kind of look at this, so how do we just do it ethically, right? So, when some of our owner banks, for example, send this data, well we can provide services overarching to provide insights across the board, something they can not let's say, do on their own, without our help, type of thing. >> Real quick, define data ethics, 'cause you mentioned ethics many times. Do you mean securely, anonymized, what does that mean for you? >> Well, to me it means like that old, you know, 20 years ago for example, I would take my wallet, maybe put it in my vault, in my vault 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, that someone's not using it for, for improper use, things like that, that's how define ethical use, right? >> What're you doin' now that you couldn't do before, we're seeing this awesome cloud, you mentioned, Kubernetes gets me pumped up, because that's kind of a horizontal orchestration, you talk about multi-cloud, these are things that are, coming into sight with those kinds of technologies. There's an old way, there's a new way, right? (laughs) 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 and Hadoop the way we can scale our web applications 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. What's really important is, when they moved to digital channels, you know, 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 to digital channels, were there for the ride, type of thing. >> Chris, it's a great interview, I'd love to follow up with you and learn more about your environment. Final question, I heard you got the Informatica innovation award honoring, congratulations! >> Thank you. >> Advice to other folks doing cutting edge stuff that might be interested in 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, Toronto area, Chris thanks for comin' on theCUBE, appreciate your stories. theCUBE live coverage here in Las Vegas for Informatica World 2018, I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris, we'll be back after this short break. (bubbly music)