Antony Fung

As the financial industry increasingly embraces the cloud, the underlying and often overlooked energy crisis threatens to derail cloud ambitions. SunGard, a hyper-scale data centre and cloud provider, has already fallen victim, and an estimated 16,000 clients are left scrambling in the aftermath. This article explores the underlying cause of rising energy prices, the impact on data centres, the risks to the financial industry, how firms can mitigate risks, and how CJC can help.

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Why ‘Always-on’ Trading Needs ‘Always-on’ Support

As financial markets shift toward 24/7 equities trading, demand for always-on infrastructure and global support is increasing. This video explores the operational challenges and insights from CJC’s decade of experience delivering real-time market data around the clock. With insights from 4 of our experts (Victor Arriola, Brian Daly, Steve Geary, and Peter Williams), discover why success goes beyond uptime—it’s about scalable support and reliability.

Chapters:

• 0:00 – The Reality of 24/7 Trading.
• 0:25 – How CJC Powers Global Coverage.
• 1:03 – The Stakes for Exchanges.
• 1:27 – CJC’s Expert Opinions.
• 4:58 – Final Thoughts: Beyond Uptime.

At CJC, we have operated a true 24/7 support model for almost 13 years—a milestone that took over two years to achieve. We know first-hand that enabling ‘always-on‘ operations is far more than simply extending working hours. It demands deliberate design across systems, teams, and time zones. Becoming a 24-hour operation means:

• Engineering for resilience.
• Structuring support models that scale.
• Synchronising operations across global regions.
• Investing in people, training, and process governance.

Instead of relying on brute-force staffing, we have built and productised a specialised and dedicated managed service model—designed for real-time market data systems and rooted in people, tooling, and process maturity. It is designed to flex and respond to client needs, without compromising stability or continuity. Crucially, it scales and allows us to deliver to more customers without needing to increase headcount linearly.

How CJC Delivers Global Coverage

To operate without interruption, you need a support centre presence where it matters, strategically. For CJC, that meant building operations in key financial hubs:

• London (HQ) – Established in 2006, leading our EMEA region.
• Hong Kong and Singapore – Launched in 2010 and 2011, anchoring APAC coverage.
• New York – Operational since 2012, covering AMERS support.

Each region operates a 12-hour shift at 7 AM local time. These are not handover teams, but autonomous, overlapping, and capable support units responsible for maintaining infrastructure, managing incidents, and executing planned changes within their respective time zones.

Key Enablers Include:

• Structured shift overlaps for seamless follow-the-sun coverage.
• Scaled and codified to ensure holidays, absences, and surges never impact service delivery.
• Embedded escalation and service-level agreement (SLA) management practices.

The goal is not only to keep the lights on, but also to deliver a service with a consistent quality globally.