September 15, 2021
Prepare A Business Case For Shifting Your Market Data To The Cloud

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Antony Fung
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As a technological curiosity, the cloud has become integral to modernizing the IT environment and enabling digital transformation of companies of all sizes. From lower operating costs to greater compatibility with digital enterprises' working styles, cloud-based computing and storage platforms offer a multitude of advantages over traditional on-premise systems.

We recently announced we had completed the migration of all managed service products and tooling to the public cloud.  This was an enormous undertaking, but it's also the same challenge many capital markets firms are facing - and to which CJC is already contributing.  We are releasing a blog series on the following topics:

  • Expertise

  • Why and What?

  • How?

  • Migration and Security

  • Benefits and Future

While moving to public clouds offers well-known mainstream benefits, past experience shows that you need to define what those benefits will be based on an assessment of your current infrastructure.  After building and migrating, these metrics can be held as a success criteria. 

We had stated the following:

Reduced reliance on smart hands-based change work and datacentre access

Our legacy physical technology has been decommissioned now that our footprint is in the public cloud. The era of unboxing, racks, stacks, moves, and smart hands is gone. Instead, we have the capability to scale up/scale down as we like and upgrade as we wish.

Increased investment into underlying technologies, adding far greater power, speed and resilience than before

At CJC, one of our key objectives was to reduce infrastructure costs and to reinvest the income into powering our systems. The public cloud migration project was a major success. This was due to the upgrade of our technology stack, our systems are now running almost 100% faster than before. In addition to this, we have added major security enhancements, increased resilience, and expanded the number of development, QA, and UAT environments. Our footprint has not shrunk - it has greatly increased.

CJC reduce the amount of infrastructure technology types we support

CJC offers various forms of cloud computing, including public cloud computing and private cloud computing.  As public cloud adoption continues, we want to be able to expand our skillsets to these new tools. The ability to move on from our knowledge of the technologies we used in private cloud and those around physical technologies means we have more time to focus on these modern disciplines.

This is also vital for the future.  We expect with cloud technologies, server counts will in fact grow, as we have seen internally.  We now have more development and QA environments, increased resiliency than we had before, however, cloud tooling and expertise mean that we do not need to have the same ratios of workforce per server as we currently have.  Indeed, as server count goes up, we expect our staffing levels to remain static – it will be our capabilities that will increase.

Ability to include enhancements to underlying technologies which were not available in physical versions

By migrating to the cloud, we have been able to ensure that all our underlying technologies were future-proofed.  Our time-series database itself has multiple ‘public cloud’ only integrations.  Indeed, we are seeing frequently that development teams for capital markets are focused on cloud enablement, with leading platforms being signed off for Amazon Linux 2.  

Future

As a result of all these benefits, CJC can build, launch and grow its products, platforms, and skills faster than ever before.  Our teams have a far greater capacity to continue their cloud accreditations, expertise and experience.  Our platforms and tools now have far greater power and resiliency and our development teams have far more environments to build from.

Public cloud capabilities are now available for our platforms.  The public cloud offers the best technologies that can be scaled, plugged-in, and integrated, such as Google BigTables and BigQuery.  Integrating these data sets will be handled by our data science teams, which will enhance our platforms and products and ultimately, our clients.

In order to gain a competitive edge, companies must use cloud platforms and services wisely because their decisions can either give them an edge or leave them lagging behind. From application developers to the infrastructure teams, IT specialists will need to know how to use cloud-based services effectively. Learning the skills to create and deploy cloud applications should be part of such a program, as it will enable teams to develop and deploy cloud applications in a timely manner.

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