Prior to starting red violet, the company’s principals built and sold companies focused on similar solutions using technology built using traditional data-center infrastructure. With red violet, they decided to develop a cloud-native version on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver new levels of scalability and performance and massively reduce the company’s capital expenditure.

This approach enables red violet to run large data-processing jobs on daily, weekly, and monthly cadences as various types of data are ingested into the system—without committing to a large infrastructure purchase. Achieving maximum cost efficiency without compromising on analytics speed and performance is critical to maintaining the company’s competitive edge.

“Building the data sets our customers rely on requires an enormous amount of processing power,” says Jeff Dell, chief information officer at red violet. “In the past, we built out traditional data centers with a thousand or more nodes to handle the compute load. The initial investment alone runs into the tens of millions of dollars—yet ultimately those machines were only running a few hours a day at the most, which is an enormous waste of money.” The AWS Cloud enables red violet to perform these kinds of processing-intensive tasks using

“Our competitors are running on old-school data-center architecture,” says Dan MacLachlan, chief financial officer at red violet. “Using AWS gives us the advantage of having the latest and greatest technology, and the capacity and power we need. We can spin up quickly when we have high data volumes. Within the industry, it makes us light years ahead of where competitors are, even those with a longer operating history.”