What Is Data Infrastructure?
Most digital products today are built on data, but few stop to ask: how does that data actually flow? What sits underneath your dashboards, workflows, and business logic?
That’s the job of data infrastructure, the unseen layer that collects, organizes, and activates data so your teams (and your customers) can do something with it.
As more of the world’s data lives behind portals without APIs, traditional infrastructure is starting to buckle. It’s time for a new approach, one that meets the moment, not just the spec sheet.
Data Infrastructure: The Basics
At its core, data infrastructure refers to the systems, pipelines, and tools that move data from source to action.
It includes:
- Connectors: APIs, webhooks, and agents that pull or receive raw data
- Storage: Databases, data warehouses, and data lakes
- Processing layers: ETL tools, workflows, analytics engines
- Access and security: Permissioning, encryption, observability
- Activation: The ability to push insights or trigger actions in real time
Every product that relies on external data needs infrastructure to do two things:
- Read from third-party systems
- Write back to them when something changes
Sounds simple, but the reality is, most third-party systems don’t make it easy.
Why Legacy Infrastructure Falls Short
In a perfect world, everyone would expose a clean, modern API. But in the real world, critical user data is locked behind thousands of portals. These include utilities, banks, payroll providers, insurance dashboards, and more.
To connect with those systems, teams have historically had three options:
- Manual uploads (slow and error-prone)
- RPA bots (brittle and expensive to maintain)
- Official APIs (if they exist, they’re often incomplete or outdated)
All of these create bottlenecks. Ops teams get buried in tickets, and engineering teams are stuck building yet another one-off integration.
Deck’s Take: A New Layer for Read and Write
At Deck, we think about data infrastructure differently.
Instead of waiting for official APIs, we built a platform that turns the entire web into a user-permissioned, read and write interface.
Our agents operate through the same UI a user would. That means we can pull balances, submit forms, update payment methods, and more. If it can be done in a browser, it can be done with Deck.
Here’s how it works:
- One API to connect with 100,000+ portals across utilities, telcos, SaaS, payroll, and more
- Browser-native agents for full coverage, and job scripts for scale
- Prebuilt jobs like
FetchStatement,MakePayment, orAddPaymentMethod - Self-healing flows that adapt automatically to UI changes
No scraping hacks. No brittle bots. Just secure, scalable data flows. Read and write. Always through the front door, with full user consent.
Why It Matters
Strong data infrastructure isn’t just a backend concern. It unlocks:
- Faster product launches. No more integration roadblocks
- Better user experience. Self-service actions replace support tickets
- Reduced costs. Ops teams and engineers can focus on impact instead of maintenance
- Greater resiliency. Infrastructure adapts as portals change
Final Thought
Data infrastructure should be a superpower, not a source of friction.
Whether you're building a bill-pay product, a rewards platform, or a lending engine, your product is only as strong as the pipes it’s built on. With Deck, those pipes are smarter, faster, and built for how the web actually works today.
Ready to rethink your data infrastructure? Let’s talk.
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