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Staffing your data team is hard.
Onboarding new hires quickly is hard.
Managing a team is hard.
You know what's even harder?
Maintaining continuity through staff changes and temporary hires.
The bottom line, your team needs the right tools for the job. You need something collaborative, scalable, and secure. But even if you find a tool with all of that, IT might shoot it down or, worse, make you manage it on your own, compounding the need for more qualified and expensive data personnel.
Data teams that use R or Python tend to default to Posit. However, we believe you would rather have a tool that leverages new technologies and omits Posit’s pain points to create a novel data platform experience.
A tool like Ludis.
Within Posit’s suite of tools – shinyapps.io, shiny-server, and Posit Connect – Shinyapps.io is the only one that is cloud native. The rest of their offering requires manual server setup and maintenance that will add fat to your otherwise lean team.
With Ludis, you only need a username and password, and you have finished your “setup.” The maintenance? Well, my friend, the maintenance is on us. Just sit back and code.
Teams live and die based on collaboration. If you have ever screenshotted your work and emailed it to someone, I’m talking to you! Why not give that person access to your dashboard and let them see all the great work firsthand?
Ludis and Posit Connect both allow you to share code, insights, and data across your organization. Sharing allows your team to be collaborative and to show off their work to any decision-maker at your company. However, Posit Connect is hosted on-prem, making sharing it with people outside your organization difficult. Requiring you to talk to IT to overcome this block. On the other hand, once your IT team approves Ludis, you will never have to talk to them again. ( And if any IT people are reading, they won’t have to talk to you again! … until they lose their password )
Companies that struggle to collaborate often struggle with continuity. When team members leave, their code stays where they left it… on their computer. That’s no good. Code should live where your whole team can access it. Your ace leaves? No problem! The new hire is already reading through the code.
The situation is compounded when you hire consultants.
Consultants are a fact of life for smaller teams. When they join, they need to be productive quickly. When they leave, their work must be accessible and documented. Ludis and Posit Connect both use GitHub to manage your files. The difference is that Posit Connect requires you to install a plugin where Ludis handles confusing git commands for you. Both solutions offer a way to track consultants' work as they come and go, but Ludis doesn’t require your consultants to know how to set it up.
Once you, your team, and the decision maker are happy with whatever you shared with them, you must scale quickly. On Posit Connect, you have to manually tune your settings to allow more traffic to access your insights. Often, teams have to hire a full-time data engineer for Posit maintenance. Ludis becomes your personal data engineer by using containers for each insight or workflow and scaling containers based on your usage, allowing you to pass off the savings to the rest of your team. You could even hire another data scientist instead!
Shinyapps.io makes keeping secrets, passwords, or other sensitive information difficult because it uploads your entire Shiny app folder to the cloud. Hardcoded passwords and all. Posit Connect and Ludis do a much better job keeping private information encrypted, but you should check the restrictions around your data before deciding.
As I mentioned, Posit Connect and Shiny-Server are housed on your dedicated server. This allows you to control all aspects of the security but comes with high additional setup costs. Additionally, this prevents you from easily sharing with outside stakeholders. Ludis is hosted on the cloud and uses state-of-the-art AES-256 bit encryption, country-specific storage, and isolated compute environments to protect your data. Allowing you to safely share data with anyone you want, wherever you want.
If Ludis is a good fit for your team, reach out to us by sending an email to sales@ludisanalytics.com. Mention this blog post’s title to receive a discounted trial. We will schedule a call with you to dive into the details of your use case. If Ludis isn’t a good fit, we’re more than happy to point you in the direction of a tool that’s right for you!
