I wrote this article in the “cloud”. You’ve certainly heard this term and have no doubt used a cloud service. But, what does the cloud mean and how are financial services firm taking advantage of it? To start, if you use Gmail or Google Drive / Docs you are using the cloud or a cloud service. Both are convenient services in the sense that you can access them from anywhere (and any device) and in the case of Google Docs you can share access and make simultaneous contributions. None of the information is stored on your computer (or phone or tablet) nor do you install any software (you simply use a browser), and in the case of a business operation you do not need to acquire and maintain any servers—in a physical sense. Google handles all of this for you—giving you a cloud to operate within. You essentially are leasing computing power and accessing it virtually.
Amazon also has a cloud, named Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS provides businesses like ours (Barchart) the ability to virtualize our servers, and run them in very large and very secure data centers maintained by Amazon. We have been using AWS for six years and in doing so we have been able to gradually reduce our dependency on maintaining physical infrastructure. We still maintain a physical data center, but AWS has given us the ability to move many services into the cloud. Not only have we been able to reduce operating costs, we’ve also been able to significantly enhance our scalability and redundancy. For example, AWS provides tools to increase or decrease our server capacity instantly versus the days it took before to provision servers. We also run our services across multiple AWS locations giving us a level of redundancy that once was cost prohibitive.
We operate several of our market data and financial services within the cloud. These services include serving financial content to third-party websites like brokerage sites, as well as host www.barchart.com within the AWS cloud. Our market data, charts and news are delivered from AWS to visitors accessing our website and our clients’ sites. This amounts to a large amount of traffic easily managed in the cloud. Also, users of our trading platform, Barchart Trader, receive real-time streaming market data direct from AWS and the platform uses an AWS service named CloudFront to deploy software updates to users at very high speeds. We are also an Amazon Technology Partner and this is even more evident through the Barchart OnDemand (www.barchart.com/ondemand) service. Barchart OnDemand provides access to a collection of financial data and information through the AWS cloud. We essentially provide over 35 different APIs for accessing data when you need it or on-demand. And, as a cloud-based web service, the APIs can integrate with any type of operating system or software. By using AWS to operate Barchart OnDemand access to market data and information is easier than ever before.
Overall, the cloud has reduced our dependency on maintaining physical technology infrastructure (which is costly and slow to adjust), enhanced our infrastructure redundancy, reduced our content delivery and software deployment latency, and has made it easier to launch new services.
Mark Haraburda
