Enter the Proximity Cloud

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.

Will Cloud Computing Survive the Regulators?

It came as no surprise that of the two recurring themes of this week's Waters USA conference in Manhattan were cloud computing and the impact of new global regulatory environment on banks' global IT infrastructure.

This week's Friday Musing looks at the intersection of these trends: Can financial firms deploy new global cloud-based infrastructures in light of the recent data and application retention policies set forth by various national regulators?

Clouds, Community Clouds or Managed Services?

Our July issue of Waters magazine has been up on our website for a few days now. This month, I looked at the new "community clouds" that are popping up in the financial services space. Major vendors such as NYSE Technologies and Reuters are layering a number of business applications and data set on top of their offering there by moving the user closer to the data rather than moving the data closer to the user. Is it true cloud computing? I'm not sure. Marketers have done a wonderful job muddying the definition.

Friday Musings

Just a few day-job thoughts on how cloud computing can become a game changer when it comes to computing security.