Charlotte Pragst is tracking the latest developments in cloud engineering - as part of her studies, but also on behalf of quirion. The technology is meant to make processes in companies more efficient.
After finishing school, Charlotte Pragst actually had a different career path in mind. Her goal was the diplomatic service. To that end, she first began a degree in business administration in Berlin. But at some point, working with profit-and-loss statements no longer really satisfied her. "In my studies, for example, we kept working through debit and credit accounts by hand," the 26-year-old observes. "Yet in companies this work had long been done by software, and much faster and more efficiently."
The realization that software makes life easier and work better was reinforced above all by her side job at the time. Pragst was then working at a start-up in Berlin. There she got to know many technology specialists. "I was curious about their work and constantly quizzed them." They kept up a friendly contact, outside the job too. That's how Pragst learned more step by step and developed the ambition to program software professionally herself. In 2018 she switched from business administration to computer science.
Bachelor's thesis at quirion
In early 2022, quirion's IT department, led by Chief Technology Officer Marcel Müller, happened to be looking for support from young talent. And Pragst was looking for a way to combine theory with practice. That's how they came together, and since March 2022 she has now been working as a working student at quirion.
Her bachelor's thesis, which she successfully completed last September, revolves around the "evolution of serverless cloud paradigms" - and specifically around the very latest advancement of a cloud solution from Amazon Web Services (AWS). quirion also uses its services in order to keep its own technological capacities within manageable limits while still being technologically state of the art.
Less hardware, more efficiency
Technology has become impossible to imagine our daily lives without. It's present everywhere. Yet in a certain way it's also increasingly receding into the background. The bulky PC, for instance, which used to stand fixed in place in some corner of the apartment, has more or less disappeared. The hardware has become ever smaller and more flexibly deployable. Thanks to the internet and web-based services, it's now completely natural to have data and applications of all kinds constantly at hand.
Less hardware and more performance thanks to greater connectivity: this trend exists among companies too. They no longer necessarily have to build and operate their own IT infrastructure at great expense. Cloud computing, or "managed services," is the key here. From data storage to software, in principle everything can be managed by specialized providers, while you yourself concentrate on your own products and services.
New services in the development phase
At quirion, a service called AWS Lambda is used, among other things. "With it we save a lot of costs compared to the alternative of having to operate our own IT infrastructure," Pragst points out. Like all systems, it has certain strengths and weaknesses. AWS is currently addressing the latter by expanding another service, whose usability is right now being extensively broadened for exactly this purpose. It was precisely this service that Pragst discussed in her bachelor's thesis, and she keeps an eye on its progress for quirion.
Pragst also supports quirion's IT team with programming. After all, the work on quirion's own applications doesn't take care of itself, even with the use of the AWS services. Right now, for example, Pragst is helping to develop a software tool intended to simplify internal processes in client services. In between, she reports at internal and external events on the results of her work and on new developments surrounding cloud solutions. She has since begun her master's studies and will continue to work for quirion on the side.
What does Pragst think of digital asset management, the way quirion offers it? "When I earned my first money, I pretty quickly gave thought to investing and building wealth," Pragst recounts. "I think it's important to take care of it as early as possible, and it's a real shame that women in particular carry the stigma of supposedly not wanting or not being able to engage with financial planning." quirion's mission to democratize investing and make it accessible to more and more people suits Pragst very well. "Using the possibilities of digitalization for that is something I'm glad to help work on."
