How NumberCloud works

It’s important to focus on the crucial financial and operational information in your organisation.

INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Our services are specifically designed to store and manage your key metrics – rather than all the internal data of specific applications or activities.

To allow this critical information to be collected as easily as possible, we:

  • Impose minimal setup and administration, so your metrics can be collected almost immediately
  • Allow new metrics to be defined implicitly as they’re discovered
  • Maintain a full and detailed audit trail – with full transparency of changes, results and details – so you can use your metrics with confidence

This approach helps IT teams to meet the needs of their organisation’s stakeholders, without wasting valuable time and resources. Plus, stakeholders have access to reliable, consistent metrics across all applications and operations, allowing greater control, and for processing to be automated.

how it works

Identify metrics from any source

Our services allow your metrics to be identified, captured and updated from almost any modern application, running on any platform.

Using NumberCloud’s RESTful API, your metrics can be posted from any HTTP client application.

Plus, our simple – but standardised – metric representation, Portable Number Format (PNF), minimises the time required to design new data collection processes. PNF also guarantees consistent data handling and management across diverse data sources.

Metric Transaction Engine (MTE)

The NumberCloud Metric Transaction Engine (MTE) tracks changes in metrics caused by significant events within your organisation.

How the MTE works:

  • Your organisation’s critical events are posted through the NumberCloud RESTful API
  • The affected metrics, along with their metadata and objects referenced, are stored in a standardised and consistent format
  • Compound metrics, based on the values of other metrics, are derived
  • Applications can retrieve metric updates in sequence, giving you the confidence that no changes are missed

Intelligent Metadata Engine (IME)

NumberCloud metrics don’t have to be defined in advance. Instead, new metrics and their references are posted as they are discovered.

But, to avoid any issues with unstructured data hindering the identity of the types of information being stored, we created NumberCloud’s Intelligent Metadata Engine (IME). The IME automatically tracks your metrics as they’re posted, and identifies common patterns and builds a model of the data being stored.

NumberWorks metrics Software development
NumberWorks metrics Software development

Content Capture Network

NumberCloud’s application programming interface (API) is specially designed to ensure updates to your organisational metrics are made with as few interruptions as possible.

To achieve this, update calls to the API consist of a short ‘instruction capture’, instead of a time-consuming service call. The instruction capture processing is fast and simple. Plus, the information can be distributed in what could be referred to as a ‘content capture network’.

These instructions are then processed, and the results accessed as they become available.

Updating metrics across multiple applications

Cross-Application Updates

We know important business metrics don’t only change in isolation. In fact, alterations often happen as part of a set, and the consistency of the set can be as important as the individual values.

Updating your metrics across multiple applications can seem daunting at first. But NumberCloud’s committal process will make sure changes applied across various applications deliver consistent and comparable data.

NumberCloud allows updates to be posted in the following stages:

  • Prepared – changes are assembled but not yet confirmed
  • Committed/aborted – the prepared changes are confirmed or abandoned
  • Compensated – automatic rollback of confirmed changes, but with full audit trail
  • Published – the status of the changes is complete, so other applications can adjust accordingly
security

Security

We know security is important, so we keep your critical business information safe using:

  • Encryption – access to the NumberCloud API is via HTTPS requests. Unencrypted HTTP requests are accepted but HTTPS is preferred
  • Authentication – every request to the API must include an API key using the HTTP authorisation header to identify the user or application issuing the request
  • Authorisation – once authenticated, every request to the API is checked against the user’s authorisation map to ensure access to a specific NumberCloud resource is allowed

Hosting

NumberCloud, as its name suggests, is a cloud-based service, and you can choose the nature or location of the cloud:

  • Public – with our hosted service

  • Private – with your preferred cloud hosting service

  • On premises – install NumberCloud on your own infrastructure

TAKE THE NEXT STEP…

Get in touch today to discover how our services can help you and your team turn data into information.

0161 927 4000 info@quantiv.com