[ I N D E P T H | T H E C L O U D ]
“ Once the venue moves to the cloud , then financial services institutions will follow , as they have been in increasing amounts over the last 10 to 15 years .”
MATT BARRETT , FOUNDER AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF ADAPTIVE FINANCIAL
CONSULTING
An ( in ) convenient truth ? As fruitful as a future in the cloud is claimed to be , wherein “ running markets fully in the cloud will usher in a new era for capital market infrastructure and market participants ,” as AWS ’ whitepaper puts it , there is an important argument that currently the environment in question is in actuality not yet developed enough in order to support cloud operations across the board .
This point of view cannot – and truly should not – be ignored , it remains a key reason why a , often vocal , subsect of the industry is yet to be convinced . Getting into specifics , the reasonings include latency , performance , resilience … however , those on team cloud are convinced that eventually these topics will be successfully addressed .
The existence of some reticence is arguably less understandable as market moves continue to demonstrate an uptick in adoption .
Addressing this , Kain explains : “ Capital markets firms from virtually every component of the trade lifecycle have been leveraging AWS for over a decade to power their important workloads ,” adding that a significant number of segments of the capital markets space is already linked to the cloud in various examples – from the financial data which drives investment decisions to the analytics needed for investment research and trading .
“ Given how much capital markets infrastructure can and does run on the cloud , there are very few workloads that we haven ’ t seen migrate .”
Discussing the idea of readiness gaps amongst market participants , in particular those somewhat resisting the uptake , Bhat tells The TRADE : “ We believe that we probably need
to lower the barriers of understanding of how to leverage our technology . In the context of capital markets , whether you ' re a venue , buy-side , sell-side , institutional , etc . We all need to unlock that value together .
“ What we ’ ve found is when you do it in a way which is less rip and replace , and more collaborative , the barriers are lowered more easily . The cloud is no longer something that ' s only of value for the digital natives or those born in cloud .”
However , though a large part of the market believes cloud migration is only a matter of time , many are currently investing in systems which ,
68 // TheTRADE // Q1 2024