Paving the Way For the Cloud in Finance

In previous posts, I have explored a few themes around why Duco is made available as SaaS (Software as a Service) and what we learned along the way: 5 Reasons
February 23, 2017 - Editor

In previous posts, I have explored a few themes around why Duco is made available as SaaS (Software as a Service) and what we learned along the way:

Here is a 2017 update!

Amazon advances

As of February 2017, Duco continues to host out of co-location facilities, with hardware under our control. Differences in attitude are now emerging, however:

  • Banks in the United States are advancing on the topic of hosting confidential data – adequately protected – on AWS, Azure, and so on. There are still big differences between institutions, but the change in attitude is palpable. Capital One is the most obvious example.
  • Banks in the United Kingdom are still mostly conservative on this issue. Development and test workloads in the cloud, not much else.
  • Banks in Continental Europe are in follower mode. Lots of in-house only, still common aversion to cloud.
  • Brokers and Hedge Funds everywhere are eager adopters of SaaS, but attitudes on public cloud still vary.

At Duco we are waiting for the great inversion:

  • From “we won’t use it because it’s on AWS”
  • To “we won’t use it because it’s not on AWS” (and your data centre is one we don’t want to waste time auditing)

In the meantime, we continue to offer our customers varying degrees of segregation, down to their own hardware, to ensure that we match their current level of comfort.

Jurisdictional joy

A particular restriction on adoption are the data protection and banking secrecy requirements of countries like Switzerland, Luxembourg, Singapore, South Korea and so on.
Here, there is no choice but to engage locally. Duco’s strategy is to build out cloud, data centre, or other capacity in these jurisdictions to meet the needs of our local customers. Watch this space for a big announcement soon.

DevOps automation wins

Reading through these issues around jurisdiction and multiple data centres sounds like a nightmare, until you consider that by using modern DevOps automation (Puppet, Ansible, etc), Duco can provision an entire data centre or VM cluster from scratch in 2-3 days.

This enables us to think of jurisdictional barriers, differences in attitude to the cloud, and so on, as not particularly insurmountable problems, but just differences in execution environments that we can bridge in a fairly agile manner any time we choose to.

And so…

Duco now processes billions of lines of data per year, for major banks, hedge funds, exchanges, brokers and traditional asset managers. All as Software as a Service. Even five years ago, some of this would have been unthinkable.

In the next three years, we think attitudes toward SaaS on cloud infrastructure will continue to evolve, with greater adoption globally. We will be there, and our customers will reap the reward of increased economies of scale.

For more information contact Duco.


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