Antony Fung

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Globally, this pandemic has affected the technology platforms used across the globe, including the capital markets. As concern and realization set in, volatility increased. Volatility led to a long-term and unprecedented rise in usage, leading to outages after outages. Several well-known market participants have been suffering from poor systems that were simply not designed or built to handle such volume.

A major internet outage hit mainstream firms as well as the capital markets on Tuesday, 22nd July 2021. As with an earlier outage, the outage was caused by a capacity issue caused by Akamai.

Capital markets tend to suffer from capacity issues, which can lead to ineffective operational resilience. The operational resilience chain, with exchanges, vendors, the sell-side and buy-side, and counterparties and partners, is only as strong as the weakest link. In order to have good capacity management, and operational resilience, volatility is just one of many challenges that must be addressed.

Transformation

In the capital markets industry specifically, the cloud is rapidly advancing and multiple mergers and acquisitions are occurring. Changes in technology, such as migration to the cloud or a change in management support staff, can cause serious outages. In many areas, capital markets use legacy technology. Specialized systems that do not fit into the cloud environment, needing specialist knowledge. An effective migration toolkit and expertise are essentials to capacity management.

When identifying its future requirements, either by a new support agency or in a cloud environment (or both), it is vital to have a thorough understanding of its performance over the course of time. Without realizing the actual capacity of the platform or how to respond to sudden capacity issues, it is easy to 'lift and shift' a platform to the cloud.

Solutions

Throughout the years, CJC has consistently leveraged strong capacity planning with effective tools developed by engineers and developers who are recognized in the industry. We offer managed services based on our mosaicOA platform, which is leveraged by multiple tier one banks. CJC's dashboards are powered by vendor technologies, message broker systems, and in-house developed applications (and DNS servers).