cloud computing

You are currently browsing articles tagged cloud computing.

TGIC: Thank Goodness It’s Cloud

November 2, 2012 in Architecture, Current Events, Design, Regulations | Permalink

I’ve been pretty silent this week due to Hurricane Sandy. It hasn’t been because I’m still one of the thousands of residents in Hoboken, NJ without power and Internet access.

Luckily, I planned  a four-day visit to see family before Sandy hit. Now it has turned in to an 11- or 12-day visit.

So far my evacuee experience has been relatively painless, save for my car.

After several years of dedicated service, my 1984 190D decided it was time to go to great parking garage in the sky. I guess it just didn’t want to deal with New Jersey’s current fuel shortage, road work and downed trees.

Work-wise, things are beginning to get back to normal as more people get back to business. Thanks to various online storage, office applications and Skype, I’m back too. These cloud-based applications and storage services made it easy to pack up my necessary files and go.

Yes, I could have left home with my local back-up drive in hand and move all of my files to my off-site FTP server, but that would have taken a bit more time and would meant that I had the foresight to know that I was going to flee Sandy.

These cloud-based applications make the workflow process easier by using the same interface whether I am running them locally or over an Internet connection. I can save documents locally or store them in the ether. Actually I do both if I can’t find a Wi-Fi spot.

This common interface approach reminds me of a recent conversation that I had with NICE Actimize president and CEO Amir Orad just before Sandy.

As it’s been reported in the press, NICE Actimize recently purchased Redkite Financial Markets. Through this acquisition, NICE Actimize now has its existing client-hosted AML and regulatory platform as well as  Redkite’s cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering.

The vendor plans to continue developing both platforms for different client segments, says Orad. Actimize will remain the platform for Tier-1 clients while Redkite provides an offering for Tier-2 clients that might not have deep pockets when it comes to IT spending.

One of the first synergies Orad expects from the deal is an updated Actimize’s user interface (UI) based on Redkite’s current UI slated to be released sometime in the first half of 2013. This update will make Actimize’s UI more user-friendly and let users move between the separate technology platforms without thinking about it.

This is just one of the latest situations I’ve observed where software vendors realize the importance of the user experience (UX) now that clients are turning more and more to cloud-based services.

 

 

Tags: , , , , ,

East Coast EC2 Suffers Another Power Outage

June 30, 2012 in Architecture, Current Events | No comments

The violent storms that rocked the mid-Atlantic states last night and early this morning with the second punch in a rapid one-two-punch that affected East Coast users of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and related offerings on the eve of the unofficial July 4th weekend.

The Amazon facility that houses its Availability Zone for the US-East-1 region lost power just before midnight Friday night. Amazon staff managed to restore power within a matter of minutes and recovered roughly half of the affected EC2 instances and a third of the affected Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes within the first three hours. Employees continue their recovery efforts and warn that some EBS volumes may have inconsistent data due to the power outage, according to a posting on Amazon Web Services’ Service Health Dashboard.

Friday morning EC2 users also experienced connectivity issues with the same Availability Zone as multiple network devices in the same availability zone suffered routing table exhaustion.

“Some of the devices in this [Availability Zone] had not been reconfigured to handle the increase in required routing table space, and this exceeded the allocated capacity on those devices,” according to another posting on Amazon Web Services’ Service Health Dashboard. “This caused excess load on the router control processor which in turn caused high levels of packet loss. When this high level of packet loss occurred, EC2 instances and EBS volumes connected to those devices lost network connectivity. Once we discovered the root cause, the affected network devices were reconfigured to mitigate this problem and connectivity to impacted instances and volumes was restored. We are currently putting better monitoring in place across all of our network devices globally to prevent this from happening again.”

All of this comes on the heels of a similar outage suffered by the same facility on June 18.

 

Tags: , , ,

Checking Out of the Hedge Fund Hotel

June 29, 2012 in Architecture, Fi-Tech Culture, Trading | No comments

Most new hedge funds rather spend time readying their trading strategies for production than setting up their IT infrastructure. With the continued growth of hosted IT offerings, rolling out the necessary infrastructure has never been faster. In this latest Daly Post Podcast episode, Rob discusses this trend with Chris Grandi, a founder and managing director at Abacus Group LLC, and how hedge funds can avoid common pitfalls in implementing these deployments.

Tags: , , , , ,

Trading from the Cloud: Been There, Done That

June 6, 2012 in Architecture, Design, Disruptive Technology, Trading | No comments

During yesterday’s TabbForum MarketTech conference Jeff Bell, executive vice president, clearing & technology at Wedbush Securities and CEO of Lime Brokerage, set the audience buzzing with his opinion that the industry would see mashup-based trading systems operating from a cloud environment in the future.

He quickly qualified the statement saying that such a trading system architecture would not meet the needs of everyone’s trading strategies (read: high frequency and latency arbitrage traders), but it would for many trading firms.

Bell didn’t go into further detail on whether these trading systems should reside in a firm’s private cloud or be delivered as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering.

I might be showing my age, but I believe that we are already there.

What is the major difference between a mashup-based trading system and a trading platform using service-oriented architecture and federated identity management to deliver trade-related operations? Not much, but marketing hype.

If your firm uses a hosted order or execution management system, it doesn’t matter how the vendor is operating their platforms on the other end of the router as long as they maintain their service level agreements (SLAs). A few might offer clients dedicated hardware, but many already take advantage of a shared infrastructure’s economy of scale to lower their operation costs.

It’s the same discussion we’ve had for the past several years, just with new buzzwords that haven’t lost their shine yet.

 

 

Tags: , , , ,

Enter the Proximity Cloud

February 24, 2012 in Architecture, Disruptive Technology | No comments

Ever since grid and cloud computing popped up on the capital markets’ radar screen, both architectures have been pitched as a cost savings technology that let users spin up virtual servers on demand and retire them as soon as the jobs they ran were over. In addition, firms can transform their capital expenses related to the care and feeding of internal clouds environments to a much lower cost operational expense by paying for just the resources they use by using third-party cloud offerings.

However, most technologists agree that cloud architecture falls down when it tries to run latency-sensitive applications. Most technologists agree that latency-sensitive applications function best on dedicated hardware, which avoids various levels of virtualization and typically are co-located with the exchange or liquidity venue. Cloud environments typically are located outside co-location venues due to the high real estate prices co-location vendors charge.

Speaking with Mark Casey and Adam Wray, CEOs of CFN Services and Tier 3 respectively, they believe that they have solved at least half of the problem through a recently announced partnership. If you are not familiar with the two 5-year old vendors, CFN Services delivers hosted co-located market data and trade execution capabilities to 70 global liquidity centers via its Alpha Platform. Tier 3 offers its clients enterprise-grade virtual private cloud environments within its Chicago, New York and Seattle facilities.

You can see where this is going. It was only a matter of time before the industry saw a “peanut butter in chocolate and chocolate in peanut butter” moment.

Under the terms of the partnership, CFN Services will contract Tier 3 services to power CFN Services’ new Alpha Platform On-Demand that lets users self-provision a virtual private cloud for their applications.

According to Casey, he does not envision latency-arbitrage firms moving their front-office applications to the cloud, but he could easily them running middle- and back-office clearing and settlement applications on the cloud. Other types of trading firms could easily see benefits of moving their trade-strategy testing into the co-located cloud, he adds.

Casey and Wray acknowledge that it is early days for the new service, which is available in Chicago and New York. Tier 3 plans to add nodes in Europe and Asia-Pacific in the second half of the year, which will make it a global offering, says Wray.

Looking at the immediate competition for this service, I am not aware of any direct apples-to-apples offering. There is NYSE Technologies’ Capital Markets Community Cloud (CMCC) and Thomson Reuters’ Elektron, but those are located in NYSE Euronext and Savvis data centers respectively. The vendor with the closest business model is Europe- and Asia-Pacific-focused MarketPrizm, which has not added a computing on-demand offering yet.

The offering looks so obvious now that CFN Services and Tier 3 has announced it, I’m sure that similar agreements will be coming soon from the other providers in about a year or so.

Tags: ,

« Older entries