For as long as digital marketing has existed, a tension has existed between innovation and privacy. Every leap forward in targeting, measurement, and personalization also raised new questions about data protection, consumer trust and the balance of control. That tension is now reaching a breaking point. 

At InfoSum, we’ve always believed decentralization is the answer. Data should never have to be moved, copied, or centralized in order to be useful. That belief drove the creation of our Bunker technology: secure and isolated data environments that allow collaboration without movement or exposure. For years, Bunkers have enabled the world’s largest brands, media owners and platforms to connect datasets, build audiences and measure performance without raw data ever changing hands. 

But then we asked ourselves a deceptively simple question: What if Bunkers could be deployed directly into our clients’ environments?

It was a simple question with profound implications. And answering it led us to Beacons. 

How did Beacons evolve from Bunkers?

Bunkers were groundbreaking because they redefined how data collaboration could be done. They proved you didn’t need to pool data into a centralized warehouse to generate insights. And they remain the trusted foundation for thousands of secure collaborations today. 

As adoption grew, the needs of enterprises evolved. Organizations sought to connect across multiple clouds, experiment with new data types such as images and videos, and prepare for AI-driven workflows. All with the same speed, simplicity and protection they valued in Bunkers.

Beacons take everything powerful about Bunkers and make it native to the environments our clients already use, delivered as a lightweight app experience. They represent a new generation of technology built for interoperability, AI, and collaboration at enterprise scale.

Why do Beacons matter for the future of data collaboration?

At its core, Beacons solves the industry’s persistent fragmentation problem, while unlocking its greatest opportunity: AI-powered intelligence.

In today’s landscape, data lives everywhere. Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and more. Each platform is optimized in its own way, but none are designed for collaboration across the ecosystem. That fragmentation has forced companies into a painful trade-off: either move data into a single location (and accept the privacy, cost and governance risk), or keep data siloed (and lose out on the collaborative intelligence locked within it). 

Beacons change the equation.

By deploying directly into the client’s own cloud environment, Beacons eliminate the need for data movement while enabling cross-cloud collaboration. A brand on Google Cloud can collaborate with a media owner on AWS and a retailer on Azure. All without anyone surrendering control of their data or having to undertake a costly data rearchitecture. For the first time, interoperability is now a buzzword. It's real, it's practical, and it's secure. 

What makes Beacons a technical breakthrough?

It was a simple question: what if Bunkers could live in our clients’ environments? Turning that idea into reality required solving a series of technical challenges.

1. Deploying everywhere

Beacons needed to work across all major cloud providers. That meant building a lightweight, flexible app architecture capable of deploying natively into Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure. No wrappers. No bolt-ons. Just seamless integration with the technologies enterprises already trust. 

2. Zero data movement

The foundation of our solution remains the same. Data never moves, never copies, never centralizes. Beacons extend this principle by providing full access to existing datasets, enabling collaboration while keeping sensitive information protected. 

3. AI-ready architecture

Traditional matching relies on identifiers such as email addresses or phone numbers. But the future belongs to vectors - mathematical embeddings that capture context and behavior. Beacons natively support vector databases, enabling companies to match and model data across various formats, including structured records, images, audio, video, and even free text. This opens the door to privacy-safe, AI-ready collaboration and modelling at scale. 

4. Real-time intelligence

Lag is no longer acceptable. Consumer behavior shifts continuously and in real-time; intelligence and governance must do the same. Beacons are designed for continuous updates, enabling insights that reflect real-world behaviors as they happen, while also allowing faster responses to client needs such as data governance, opt-outs, and privacy controls. The result: always-on collaboration, not after-the-fact reporting.

5. Enterprise-grade protection

As with Bunkers, privacy-by-design is a non-negotiable and guiding principle at InfoSum. Beacons layer in granular permissions, audit trails and privacy controls, ensuring that every collaboration is as safe and governed as if it were happening within your own firewall. 

Why is now the right time for Beacons?

Beacons aren’t just a technology release. They’re a response to a pivotal moment for our industry. 

The pressure on marketers has never been higher. They’re expected to provide ROI in a landscape where identifiers are disappearing, consumer expectations for privacy are rising, and budgets are under scrutiny. At the same time, the opportunity has never been greater. As WPP Media CEO Brian Lesser has noted, media is now everywhere and in everything. Advances in AI promise to unlock these opportunities and deliver new forms of intelligence, but only if the data feeding those models is both high-quality and responsibly managed. 

Beacons sit at the intersection of these forces. They provide enterprises with a way to collaborate responsibly, harness the power of AI, and unlock data that was previously inaccessible, as no one was willing to hand it over to a centralized platform. 

This isn’t just an incremental improvement. It's a shift in the foundation of how data collaboration happens. 

How will Beacons shape the future of data collaboration?

Why Beacons? Because a beacon is a signal. A guide. A light in the dark. That’s what we set out to build: technology that helps organizations navigate complexity, find clarity, and move forward with confidence. It’s also a signal of insight. A guiding light that lets partners collaborate without ever handing over raw data or proprietary information. You don’t need to know everything about a person to uncover the one thing that matters for your brand, product, or service.

Our mission has always been to put privacy and control into the hands of data owners, while enabling them to unlock more value from their data than ever before. Beacons carry that mission forward into a new era. One defined by interoperability, intelligence, and trust, all with the simplicity of a native app that makes advanced collaboration more accessible than ever.

For enterprises, that means:

• The ability to scale collaboration across any cloud.
• The power to work with any data format, in real time.
• The confidence that privacy is a non-negotiable. 

And for the industry, it means something bigger: the end of fragmentation, the end of risky trade-offs, and the start of a truly open, decentralized, intelligence-led future. 

We built Beacons because the market needed a path forward. A path that honors the trust of data owners, unleashes the potential of AI, and unlocks collaboration on a scale never before possible. 

It all began with one question: What if Bunkers could live in our clients’ environments? 

With Beacons, that question is answered. And the future of data collaboration is brighter than ever.