Eric Troyer, Chief Marketing Officer, Megaport
Offering the massive amounts of storage and compute power that drives our digital lives, the cloud is an incredible innovation, one that has changed the way we communicate, the way we consume entertainment, the way we work – and, yes, the way we do business. But the cloud cannot work without the network infrastructure underneath.
Global financial exchange operators are harnessing cloud technology to make marketplaces more accessible, secure, and cost-efficient. And reliable network infrastructure is critical to enabling the robust and secure connectivity required by buyers and sellers, fund managers, and investment banks in a marketplace.
Scaling up with the cloud
It was the potential of the cloud that caught the attention of Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), a Fortune 500 firm that operates regulated marketplaces, including the New York Stock Exchange, and provides market data and technology solutions for the listing, trading, and clearing of derivatives contracts and financial securities across major asset classes.
ICE has long offered a significant portfolio of data services used to support the trading, investment, and risk management needs of financial institutions, corporations, and government entities around the world. But to scale up, the ICE Global Network team knew they had to extend these services beyond the company’s own network, allowing customers to utilise financial and data services wherever and whenever they were needed.
The answer, they realised, lay in the cloud.
It was a conclusion reached after observing customer behaviour. ICE Global Network noticed that not all of its clients required direct access to its global network via a physical point of presence in order to utilise important business content and services. Aware that many had also woven public cloud services into their in-house computing architecture, ICE knew that it was there, in the cloud, that it wanted to make strides forward.
The end result of this understanding was developing what it calls ‘IGN Cloud Connect’; a service that provides customers secure access to ICE’s proprietary data content – including ICE Consolidated Feed, ETF Hub, Pricing, and Reference Data – directly from the cloud. An intuitive solution, IGN Cloud Connect is designed for easy customer adoption and integration on a rapid timeframe.
A key part to ensuring the success of this project was designing cloud-based access that was on par with on-premises solutions, including security and low latency. ICE Global Network also needed to make sure that customers could adopt and integrate this new solution quickly and easily to anything they already use. This was where a software-defined network (SDN) made all the difference.
Connecting it all together
With all the flexibility that the cloud provides, matching it with the connectivity element is key to fully utilising its potential – [potential that cannot be reached with the unreliable public internet]. With a software-defined approach, everything is mediated through a software layer that connects the full cloud infrastructure.
Using software-defined networking to build a purpose-built, private network-as-a-service (NaaS) greatly simplifies the process of creating and provisioning hybrid and multicloud networks – making it the ideal solution to match the flexibility that ICE Global Network required, while ensuring that it was compatible with customer needs too.
Utilising a NaaS solution to connect to the cloud also helped to reduce complexity of IT infrastructure and costs. More importantly, for financial services, it can reduce downtime as it helps to virtualise most of the physical networking devices thus reducing the network management and maintenance load.
Another major benefit for exchange operators is that they can quickly adapt to peaks and troughs in demand. Increasing bandwidth when needed can be critical to quickly adapting to changes in the stock market, for example. Ensuring that IGN Cloud Connect has connectivity to the cloud that is elastic — where bandwidth can be turned up or down in an instant – provides additional flexibility for customer needs. It also ensures that core business operations consistently perform if there are peaks in demand and that, equally as importantly, IT leaders are not paying for unused bandwidth that they don’t need.
Bringing the cloud off ICE
By utilising a NaaS solution, ICE Global Network’s new cloud offering doesn’t sacrifice any of the performance, security, or privacy that its customers have come to enjoy when connecting to data services locally. Better yet, the connectivity ensures that IGN Cloud Connect is ‘provider neutral’, meaning users can access ICE Global Network’s data via multiple public cloud environments – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud – to name a few. Coupled with a high level of reliability and cost efficiency, it’s a compelling proposition.
With the launch of IGN Cloud Connect, ICE Global Network has successfully expanded its services to prominent cloud platforms in no fewer than twenty-four countries worldwide. With that sort of reach, the company’s customers have access to over 229 cloud on-ramps across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific – each one performance-tuned and secured against cyber intrusion.
Industry-wide benefits of the cloud
ICE needn’t be the only one looking to the skies with hopes of expansion – cloud technology can be leveraged right across the exchange operator industry if it is coupled with the right connectivity.
Using software-defined networking that bypasses the public internet, exchange operators can offer their customers access to data and financial services with far greater flexibility than conventional means, without losing a shred of the security, privacy, or performance afforded by a local connection.
Add in the cost-saving potential of flexible bandwidth fees and a shorter time to market thanks to smarter connectivity, and it’s into the cloud that becomes an attractive proposition for the exchange operator sector.
