The 35 million people who saw Skyfall back in 2012 were in for a treat – thrills, tension, and a spectacular hacking attempt against the UK public sector. While many have picked up on the evident flaws in the Bond version of MI6’s approach to cybersecurity, the film provokes an interesting reminder that in our rush to digitize public services, there is certainly more to be done in ensuring that these services are secure.

In early 2016, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published the Panama Papers –one of the biggest tax-related data leaks in recent history involving 2.6 Terabytes (TBs) of information. It exposed the widespread use of offshore tax havens and shell companies by thousands of wealthy individuals and political officials, including the British and Icelandic Prime Ministers.

We’ve often asked ourselves: What’s the most natural way to provide customer support to our users?

A few years ago, Starbucks’ director of analytics and business intelligence, Joe LaCugna, said the Seattle coffee giant once struggled to make sense of the data pouring in from its loyalty card holders, which at the time was over 13 million and comprise 36 percent of all Starbucks’ transactions.

Our client is in the event business organizing regular meetups for CEO’s in the Vancouver area, specifically for technology companies. To organize these ad-hoc conferences for hundreds of people, they use excel, Salesforce as CRM, MailChimp for the emails and SurveyMonkey, well, for surveys. For those of you who have been using Keboola for some time, you might know this is the optimal setup for us.

When it comes to solutions for the big data sector, there is a clear split between the legacy and next-generation approaches to software development. Legacy vendors in this space generally have their own large internal development organizations, dedicated to building proprietary, bespoke software. It’s an approach that has worked well over the years.