Senior data engineer, Simon Thorley, recently put his Elasticsearch skills to the test to become one of the world's first Elastic Certified Engineers. He joins an exclusive community of experts, recognised for a high level of knowledge and ability with the Elastic product. Simon reports on what being a part of this global elite means for CDL and its customers.

Elasticsearch is a highly scalable, open-source search and analytics engine that allows organisations to store, search and analyse large volumes of data in near real time.

At CDL, it is used on a daily basis to provide market-leading managed data services to a number of high-profile insurance and financial services customers. These include entity resolution, point of quote enrichment with historical, dynamic and static data sets and the use of machine learning analytics to generate forecasting and anomaly alerting.

As a company always looking to be ahead of the game in its adoption of such technologies, CDL supports its people to achieve industry-recognised accreditations wherever possible. So, when Elastic released its official certification in July 2018, this provided the opportunity to acquire greater expertise.

It is a huge achievement to be internationally recognised as an Elasticsearch expert and with it, comes a whole host of benefits. Not only does the global nature of the accreditation inspire confidence in CDL's world-class services using Elasticsearch, but it highlights the expert level of knowledge and skill behind our pioneering solutions.

One of the key advantages of Elasticsearch is its capability to drive applications with complex requirements, such as CDL's high-speed data intelligence and anti-fraud solution, Hummingbird. On a surface level, the solution searches multiple data sets of any size in real-time and processes the results using business or machine learning algorithms before providing a response.

Behind the scenes, the success of this operation is reliant on the ability of CDL data engineers to tap into the full potential of Elasticsearch, which, at its core, powers Hummingbird's capacity to search huge volumes of data at high speed. Coupled with the insight that CDL's data platform offering can deliver, this provides customers with a very powerful suite of tools.

In addition to this Elastic certification, the data services team now boasts over 45 accreditations, ranging from AWS Solution Architect Associates to Google Cloud Engineers. This highlights the scale of talent behind the solutions available to our clients, with more accomplishments to be added to the team's résumé in 2019, including our engineers aiming to become Elastic Certified Engineers by the end of the year.

Elasticsearch is a multifaceted tool that can be applied to a whole range of customer challenges. CDL will continue to utilise Elasticsearch company-wide to deliver its powerful, market-leading solutions to customers, whilst deriving value from its people's expert knowledge to diversify client offerings going forward.

To find out more about harnessing the power of Elasticsearch for your data requirements, please contact your customer relationship manager.