Infrastructure to Support High ROI Work

Back during this past September, we dramatically beefed up our technology and development staff. We essentially tripled the number of programmers here at Cyclogram in the span of three months. At the same time, we won a number of new projects in which we will be collecting and storing very sensitive health information. During the following three months, Cyclogram's System Administration staff (made up of Simone Giacometti and Ernesto Vargas) completely remodeled our IT infrastructure to increase security, application speed, flexibility, and efficiency.

At Cyclogram, we want to focus on our core—improving professional development, supporting research activities, and creating engaging content. We want a technology infrastructure that provides us efficiency, flexibility, and peace of mind.

Technology advances at rapid pace today. A whole media juggernaut exists to cover the latest tech trends. Like so much in our culture today, technology choices often are made based on what's "in style." Every new IT product suggests efficiency, flexibility, and peace of mind. However, like stylish outfits many of us wore in high school, sometimes what’s “in” does not stand the test of 20/20 hindsight.

Simone and Ernesto carefully reviewed decisions we’d made over the past five years that included many hot, new technology trends like “software as a service,” “open-source,” and “cloud storage.” Some of these new tech innovations proved to be right for our long-term goals. Others did not.

We are happy to ring in 2012 with a technology infrastructure that pulls from both the trendy and the classic. Our infrastructure now really is the best of all worlds. Our hosting environment includes dedicated servers, cloud-based storage, and content delivery networks. We remain committed to open-sourced infrastructure like Drupal. Yet, we realize open source does not necessarily equal “low-cost.” We continue to leverage software as service tools, such as Salesforce.com, heavily but augment them with in-house systems that are more tailored to the unique environments in which we work.

While it would be great to think that our customers and partners will notice the benefits these changes bring, that is unlikely. It’s also not the point. IT infrastructure exists to support us. These changes will help Cyclogram concentrate more on visible high- ROI-based work.