Masthead Data boosts data confidence with observability solution powered by Google Cloud

Before co-founding Masthead Data, the question I heard constantly in my previous roles was, ‘can we trust the data?’ It’s not surprising that people have doubts. Even a minor data error can result in wasted resources, missed opportunities, and lost revenues. 

While data observability solutions do exist, many are expensive and difficult to scale, especially if you need to check every table in your database. Many organizations routinely manage several petabytes of data.

Moreover, any solution must be compliant with new legislation. According to Gartner, by the end of 2024, 75 percent of the world’s population will have its data covered by modern privacy regulations. 

All these factors led us to found Masthead Data. We focused on building a platform that catches anomalies in real time so that data engineers and data analysts can undertake root cause analysis in minutes. This prevents data-related errors from reaching consumer dashboards and gives executives and managers at all levels greater confidence when making data-driven decisions.

Masthead also stands out for our high security standards. The software doesn’t access our clients' data, directly. Instead, it undertakes analysis based on metadata and logs so that data never leaves the client’s environment. 

This means we are compliant with U.S. health care regulatory standards (HIPPA), opening the door to businesses in this sector. It also gives us a head start in other industries where security and compliance are vital, such as financial technology.

When we considered the many technology vendors to build our platform, Google’s data cloud checked all the necessary boxes to get off the ground and virtually limitless runway for us to continue innovating as a company. Google Cloud’s suite of data and security products met our immediate and long term needs.

Scale and security is in Google Cloud’s DNA

When we did our research, Google’s data cloud, which includes the BigQuery data warehouse, stood out for its flexibility and scalability. Security was another factor that influenced our decision. Like us, Google Cloud puts privacy and security first, making it popular with healthcare, fintech and others that make up our target audience. One of our customers, Tranzzo – a fintech company – is using us because we are able to deliver upon their strict privacy policy, and they could not choose other solutions on the market as all of them require access to data. 

We were also attracted by the Google for Startups Cloud Program. This includes Google Cloud credits that cover our cloud usage across all our Google Cloud services and enable us to maintain a competitive pricing model as we go to market.  

Elsewhere, Google’s data cloud forms the basis of our wider technology infrastructure, which comprises two parts: The back end that we host ourselves, and the Masthead agent hosted in our client’s Google Cloud environment. 

For the former, we take advantage of Google Kubernetes Engine to scale our back-end services and ensure their non-stop availability. We also use Google Cloud App Engine to simplify SSL enabling for microservices and Firebase as the engine for running React JS applications. Cloud SQL stores internal metrics relating to customer metadata while Cloud Images is our registry for storing build artifacts. 

On the client side, Masthead can provide two different deployment options for Masthead Agent. The first is to deploy MH Agent into the client's Google Cloud, and the second is granting MH Agent's Service Account permission to collect filtered BQ logs and metrics from the client's Google Cloud. We use Google Compute Engine to run the Masthead agent, which analyzes metadata and logs generated by the client’s Google Big Query data warehouse. 

And that's why we choose Google’s data cloud  

We also benefited from the support of Google Cloud partner DoiT who helped us to integrate our service with Looker, the Google Cloud data analytics platform used by roughly half of our customers. Their assistance was invaluable when building credibility with this audience. 

In other words, we are a 100 percent Google Cloud company, and their data cloud made that decision easy. We couldn’t have built the solution without their assistance and there’s no way we would evolve without the technology and the services that come with the data cloud and Google for Startups Cloud Program. It also gives our customers confidence to know that we are built on  one of the world’s largest, most innovative technology companies being a Google Cloud Partner. 

Most of all, partnering with Google Cloud and their data cloud has enabled us to grow our business fast. We measure our success based on the number of data tables that we monitor for our clients and that metric has increased by 1600% in just three months. At the same time, it’s good to know that we don’t have to worry about ramping up our service to meet demand. From the scalability of its infrastructure to the security of its cloud technology, Google’s data cloud takes care of our technology so that we can focus on our business and our customers. 

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.