Nasdaq OMX is offering a new cloud computing service for storing and analyzing financial trading data, and it’s built atop the Amazon Web Services cloud. The service, named FinQloud is comprised of a regulatory data retention product called Regulatory Records Retention, or R3, and an on-demand analysis tool for trade data called Self-Service Reporting, or SSR. Given the seemingly close partnership between AWS and Nasdaq, FinQloud looks like another step in AWS’s quest to prove itself ready for enterprise workloads and might suggest more such partnerships to come.
For its part, FinQloud is about what it sounds like. According to a Nasdaq press release announcing the service:
“The platform combines AWS’s secure, flexible, and cost-effective cloud infrastructure with NASDAQ OMX’s experience in providing technology and advisory services to exchanges, regulators and broker-dealers that operate within a complex global regulatory framework. FinQloud may be used by a variety of financial services firms managing data not only from NASDAQ OMX but also from any number of sources.”
In order to meet stringent regulatory compliance requirements, all data connections to FinQloud will pass through an encryption system housed in a Nasdaq data center before making their way to AWS’s infrastructure, and use of R3 will be contingent on clients showing appropriate documentation to regulators.
FinQloud won’t be the financial services industry’s foray into public cloud computing, though. In 2011, the New York Stock Exchange rolled out a cloud platform called the Capital Markets Community Platform that focuses on speeding access to trading data from markets around the world. For years, Wall Street firms have been taking advantage of cloud computing’s easy access to on-demand servers to run compute-intensive risk analyses.
However, perhaps a bigger deal for AWS than FinQloud itself is what it says about how AWS — and other cloud providers — might go about getting into the business of targeting individual industries, especially heavily regulated ones. Close partnerships like AWS appears to have with Nasdaq, which technically is the one selling FinQloud, could help cloud providers establish toeholds in lucrative markets such as financial services without requiring them to shy too far from their general-purpose nature. Cloud providers supply the infrastructure, a market player provides the industry expertise, compliance features and a trusted face, and, in theory, everybody wins.
Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user emin kullyev.
