Trading Reimagined is a biweekly content series that examines how the transformative power of technology is prompting a reimagining of the markets. Trading Reimagined is sponsored by Exegy.
Market participants face an ongoing challenge in accessing real-time market data simply, efficiently, and securely. For some firms, the answer may lie in a hybrid infrastructure that combines the capabilities of “on-prem”, or data centers, and cloud.
That was a key takeaway in a June 28 ‘Market Data in the Cloud’ webinar featuring speakers from Amazon Web Services, Equinix, and Exegy.
The webinar covered big-picture challenges and opportunities in procuring market data and migrating to the cloud, as well as the specific framework of how the three organizations collaborate on an integrated solution. AWS Outpost servers simplify datacenter or co-location infrastructure by delivering AWS Cloud technology; Equinix provides datacenter interconnect and precision time protocol support capabilities to connect to trading venues; and Exegy provides access to real-time direct market data.
Webinar speakers noted that institutional trading and investment firms still value proximity and lower latency, i.e. being closer to liquidity providers, market data providers, and counterparties. But firms also want the benefits of cloud, such as lower infrastructure costs and faster time to market.
A hybrid infrastructure solution enables cloud capabilities while retaining low latency, webinar speakers said.
Jason Murphy, Product Manager, Market Data Services for Exegy, said his firm historically has provided market data via on-prem hardware deployments.
“Exegy is now providing the same quality and reliability of our market data, ‘as a service’,” Murphy said. “This allows our partners to get the same performance and service as a standard Exegy deployment, without the need to deploy their own hardware or manage their own networks.”
Murphy stated that the hybrid solution is additive to Exegy’s hardware-centric product suite. “I’d love to tell you that all market data is moving to the cloud in the next five years, but it’s not,” he said. “For the foreseeable future there’s going to be a need for some applications to live next to the matching engines of the exchanges. We know that trading is going to be done in Equinix data centers, at the location where exchanges have their services and matching engines.”
“What the Outpost allows us is to merge these two possibilities,” Murphy continued. “We are putting Outpost, as an extension of the cloud, into the data center. The idea is that the cloud can extend to your location, and Exegy can provide data to the actual server or to the cloud.”
Murphy said the hybrid solution provides latency in the “hundreds” of microseconds, which “for a cloud deployment is where we want to be.”
“What cloud does best is scale,” Murphy added. “When you’re talking about changing capacity needs, in the cloud that can be done hour-to-hour. If you know what you need and are confident in what you need on a long-term basis, then the data center makes sense.”
