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The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a not-for-profit organization authorized by the US Congress to protect investors and ensure market integrity through regulation of broker-dealers, is a case in point. FINRA writes and enforces rules governing the activities of more than 3,800 broker-dealers representing more than 600,000 brokers.
Each day the organization oversees up to 75 billion market events, 99 percent of equities trades, and 65 percent of options trades in the US, applying data analytics to disclose any insider trading activity. FINRA shifted a key component of its IT infrastructure to Amazon Web Services, adopting AWS Lambda serverless computing to make data validation more efficient.
FINRA’s Order Audit Trail System (OATS) is part of an integrated audit trail of order, quote, and trade events for all National Market System stocks and over-the-counter equity securities. The organization uses OATS to monitor the trading practices of member firms, leveraging OATS data, along with other market data, to create the lifecycle of each order and monitor the trading practices of member firms.
Broker-dealers must submit daily electronic OATS data to FINRA, amounting to more than 50,000 files. When data is received, FINRA validates it to make sure it’s complete and correctly formatted based on a set of more than 200 rules. The system performs as many as half a trillion validations each day.
By using AWS Lambda, FINRA has increased cost efficiency by a factor of two, according to the organization. That comes from only paying for what it uses and not having to manage on-premises server infrastructure.
Create a unified infrastructure
It’s been said that a move to the cloud can create IT complexity for companies by adopting different types of services and adding multiple cloud service providers.
That’s true enough. But a broad move to the cloud can also add efficiencies and reduce costs when there’s an effort to unify various IT components within the same cloud environment.
Coverdell, a full-service marketing company that specializes in creating and delivering customized offerings for clients, in 2018 embarked on a “digital transformation” as part of a strategy to adopt a new direct-to-consumer sales model.
Part of the effort involved deploying services on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Moving a group of websites to the Azure App Service platform-as-a-service (PaaS) enabled Coverdell to cut monthly hosting costs to less than $1,000 and significantly reduce maintenance efforts.
The cost savings and other benefits drove Coverdell to look into other Azure-based offerings to support the new customer-focused business strategy and modernize its infrastructure. The company decided to shift its core applications, data, services, and underlying on-premises infrastructure to the cloud.
The move to invest in Azure and unite its network of websites, applications, data, and infrastructure within the cloud environment resulted in greater cost savings than the company expected. It was able to eliminate $54,000 in monthly costs for colocation services.
And with a new, unified infrastructure, Coverdell expects to save an estimated $1 million over the next year or two.
Migrate e-commerce and customer analytics
For many companies, the cloud has provided a new way to offer e-commerce transactions to customers. In addition to providing easier scalability and flexibility based on fluctuating demand for capacity, moving e-commerce to the cloud also presents a way to reduce costs.
METRO, a business-to-business wholesaler and food specialist, migrated its e-commerce platform to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and as a result can deliver more stable, scalable services for customers. The company also deployed a data lake on GCP to make customer data analysis more available inside the company, and to support integrated analytics and machine learning for new product development.
By “lifting and shifting” its e-commerce platform to Google Compute Engine instances, and using Google Cloud’s Virtual Private Cloud to create integrations with the company’s back-end systems, METRO reduced its infrastructure costs by 30 percent to 50 percent.
Perhaps even more welcome than these savings, the cloud migration brought significantly more stability to the e-commerce environment. Rather than having 10 virtual machines rebooting every week, the company rarely has to deal with one. Outages or periods of instability with the e-commerce platform are down by as much as 80 percent.
