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by coderjames 3838 days ago
That's interesting, thanks for adding that explanation for us not in the space.

What I'm surprised about is that the campaigns are willing to let this data be stored in the cloud on shared systems. I would have expected all proprietary data to be stored locally by each campaign on private in-house servers, probably with periodic data dumps of updates from the data provider.

3 comments

Why?

Why put forth the expense of obtaining (purchase or rent) hardware and staff to maintain that hardware? Additionally, why put forth the time and expense to write or compose a CRM-like software solution that integrates with voter data, what sounds like a dialer/call center, and "big data" tools (Spark, Hadoop, Tableau, SSIS/SSRS) that probably needs a good 6 months lead time before the candidate even announces a run for office? Also, why would every potential candidate do this every 4 years?

Sounds like a perfect choice for a hosted solution that can be iterated on outside of the election cycle.

> "big data" tools (Spark, Hadoop, Tableau, SSIS/SSRS)

whoa man...those tech's aren't even in play. lol. It's MSSQL and Oracle, with .net web apps [usually] running on top.

building on hadoop/spark is way outside their wheelhouse.

How many businesses use Google for email and document storage and run their entire system on AWS?

Private in-house servers are very expensive to set up and maintain. Nearly everyone stores vital personal information on someone else's servers.

> is that the campaigns are willing to let this data be stored in the cloud

Not the campaigns...the parties.