Working from home, with Hut34

Our data tools make remote teamwork and collaboration easier — here’s how…..

Making life just a little easier

This is the first post in what we expect will be a regular series of quick looks at various aspects of our Data Hut technology, which aim to make your team’s life just a little easier. We talk at a higher level about ‘Agile Data’ and how we can help you solve your data problems, because data solves your problems, but these posts are all about specific functionality with our toolbox which might help you out.

As we soft launch our product, and roll out pilots, we obviously had no idea that the world was about to change so significantly with the impact of the Coronavirus. Above all, we wish you and yours, your team and your family, the best through these challenging circumstances.

We have moved to a full remote team, and we’d be proud if any of our tools can help you or your organisation at all. Today we’re looking particularly at how the use of our Audit tool, baked in to the platform, helps coordinate teamwork, particularly with a remote team.

Data Huts, Data Rooms, Agile Data

First up, some context real quick. Our flagship product is a ‘data hut’ — a piece of software that offers a veritable data toolbox, allowing a multi-disciplinary team to share a secure space, where they can create secure data rooms, share and exchange data, and generally get their data moving more quickly, and adding more value.

Use of our Hut means best practice use of encryption when undertaking day to day activities such as making data available remotely (to a user at home for example), or sharing data with a co-worker or contractor, you don’t need to email data, or share access to a network, simply grant temporary access to your hut.

We get great feedback about how easy to use the interface is for anyone — you’re not required to save private key files, register devices, or do anything except confirm your identity to the Hut. The front door looks like this;

We offer heaps more information about how this tech interacts with your IAM, or OAuth, and how we leverage the Ethereum blockchain and IPFS distributed storage to create a uniquely powerful solution, elsewhere, but the focus of this post is simply one way in which it can help your team more effectively work together, by automating the sharing of their data activities in our ‘Audit’ tab.

Keep in touch, without keeping in touch

It’s well understood that communication is a key part of effective teamwork, however whilst online communication tools such as Slack, Zoom, Meet / Hangouts et al have their strengths, they’re essentially geared towards digitising either the water cooler or the meeting room, and aren’t best suited to automated communication in regard to what’s happening with the most important aspect of your team — the actual data work occurring.

With this in mind, we’ve build the Hut to allow end users to simply get on with their task, be it in R, Python, Excel, or any platform of their choice, whilst capturing and sharing their activity within their team in a way which allows all stakeholders to be ‘in the loop’ as to what is being worked on.

This information has proved to be invaluable in teams looking to reduce the time impact of meetings, and ensure productivity whether at home or on site can be measured effectively.

Where you’ll find the Audit tab

You can see below, in our demonstration hut, the Audit tab is located as the final tab within the ‘Data Tools’ menu item (obligatory CTA push — Contact us at any time if you’d like to book a virtual tour!).

As with every other aspect of the hut, access to tabs can be permissioned, with credentials imported from your IAM systems, so not all users may have access to this data. Generally, we recommend you allow anyone with rights to upload datasets rights to see the Audit data, and we encourage openness wherever possible.

Our Audit tab can be configured to track many events — out of the box, it handles requests for datasets, downloads and uploads of datasets, and the use of our various integrations, with Excel, R, Python primarily.

Each user’s action is immediately displayed cleanly and clearly for review, and permanently logged for future audit or compliance processes.

Realtime updates

As you can see below, the data hut monitors each room, and each hut actively, allowing for realtime updates on users actions. This data can be pulled into other parts of your business systems, or more prosaically, it’s very effective just to pop in and see what’s been happening over the last few hours;

Hut34 Informatics

Thanks for getting this far down the post! Finally, a short plug for our ‘Informatics’ solution services — if you feel your organisation has data problems, and you’re interested in learning about how you can leverage our team to provide solutions quickly, read more here.

We make access available to our demonstration Huts to anyone on demand, so get in touch if you’d like to pop in, or book a chat with the author, Peter, here.

Take it easy, stay safe — and stay home!