How Fixing Our Data Infrastructure Before It Broke Us Gave Back 6,200 Engineering Hours
InfoWorld, Monday, November 2nd, 2026
A contact center observability startup CTO explains how moving off flaky self-run data infrastructure ahead of a big bank deal saved 6,200 hours.
The author, from a contact center observability platform that processes large volumes of real-time interaction data, describes how a five-engineer team ran its own data infrastructure on a hosted Elasticsearch setup that had become unreliable.
A large UK bank customer expecting five times the usual traffic forced the company to confront the problem.
The author argues that CTOs at growth-stage companies often ignore infrastructure risks until a customer deadline forces an expensive decision under pressure.
The piece recounts running the numbers on onboarding the bank in-house and the decision to fix the infrastructure, which the title says returned 6,200 engineering hours.