At a glance
The challenge
The firm's trading platform ran on ageing physical servers. Market-data bursts at the open caused lag, adding capacity meant weeks of hardware procurement, and every change carried the risk of downtime during market hours.
Regulators expected strict controls over where data lived and who could reach it, which ruled out a straightforward move to shared public cloud.
Our approach
Profile latency end to end
We measured where time was lost between market-data feeds, order management and the exchange gateway.
Design a dedicated private cloud
Compute, storage and networking were sized for peak bursts, with low-latency networking between trading components.
Migrate outside market hours
Systems moved in planned stages over weekends, with rollback ready at every step.
Lock down access
Encryption, network segmentation and audited admin access were built in from the start.
The solution
Trading and market-data services now run on a private cloud that keeps latency low during the busiest minutes of the day. New capacity can be provisioned in hours instead of weeks.
Security and audit controls are part of the platform, giving compliance teams a clear record of access and data location.
Results
- Consistent performance during market-open spikes
- Capacity added in hours rather than through hardware orders
- Data residency and access controls that satisfy regulators
- Migration completed without disrupting trading hours
Technology used
- VMware / OpenStack
- Kubernetes
- Low-latency networking
- HSM encryption
- Prometheus & Grafana
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