Building a private cloud in-house can take up to 18 months and requires the following criteria to be fulfilled:
Know the current utilisation demands
It is important to understand the current activity that needs to be maintained on the existing network, as well as the expansion or reduction of services in the future.
This may be information that is readily at hand within an in-house IT department. If not, it needs to be determined through a full system audit.
Know the future utilisation forecast year on year
Private cloud environments require regular equipment refreshes and updates up to 2 years into any project.
These result from organic business growth that can be identified within historical trends, or by strategic expansion activities.
Private cloud implementations must take into account the forecast year-on-year growth and include these in the outline budget to avoid any unpleasant shocks further down the line.
Know the seasonal workload forecast
Seasonal workload profiles can skew the picture of the average capacity required over a trading period, so these need to be investigated in depth to factor in the additional compute and storage that may be required at certain times of the year.
For example financial organisations have intense activity around tax reporting dates from January to April annually. These periods need to be catered for in the budgeting and capacity planning of the private cloud environment.
Procure the appropriate hardware and network operating system
Armed with the correct capacity requirements and year-on-year expansion forecasts an in-house IT team can then approach hardware and network infrastructure vendors to specify the bare metal and necessary connectivity in their chosen data centre. This may be on-premise or co-located at a financial hub.
Build accordingly
Once the hardware and network infrastructure are available it is ready to build out. At this point IT teams will need to deploy their most knowledgeable and experienced engineers to the private cloud site to conduct implementation and production testing activities.
The time to money can be between 6 weeks and 3 years depending on different factors.
Know which public cloud environments are required to be connected
The economies of scale and the availability of shared resources in the public cloud offer attractive and cost-effective ways to scale up compute power when required.
But how the connectivity is achieved – and for what purpose – is a vital area to understand. In a highly secure and mission critical trading business, connections to the public cloud should ideally avoid touching the internet at all costs.
Ensure secure connectivity to public cloud environments where needed
The public internet needs to be avoided in order to preserve the privacy, security and performance of the cloud environment. Network connections that link point-to-point with the cloud service providers are key.
Identify and procure appropriate switching technology to ensure network privacy and security
Ethernet switching fabric solutions are often the best solution to by-pass the public internet.
Establish the network monitoring team
Network performance and security is everything in capital markets trading which relies on best-in-class low latency compute and resilient connectivity. It pays to invest in full-time dedicated network engineers who may need to travel and be accommodated at the site where necessary.
Define the network traffic monitoring and support protocols
Whilst network monitoring and support are unlikely to be among the core competencies of a capital markets trading organisation, an in-house private cloud environment nevertheless requires clear SLAs and lines of responsibility to ensure the network remains fit for purpose.
In addition IT teams need to be sure to define the protocols around third party monitoring at the edges of the network. This will avoid disputes with any third parties over performance issues and is vital in pin-pointing liabilities when trouble-shooting.
Implement the appropriate network traffic monitoring tools
There are numerous solutions to real-time analytics available variously at the network, application and operational level.
In-house IT departments will need to carefully select the correct tools to use as all three levels of the operation in order to provide insights into connections, transactions, trade volume, profitability and workflow problems.
Ensure the engineering team can access the private network location 24/7, 365 days a year
This is an expensive but necessary requirement that in-house private cloud environments cannot avoid.
Alternatively…
A managed service provider can remove many of these pain points and allow the company in question to focus on core competencies.
Beeks offering
With replicable private cloud environments in key financial hubs globally, Beeks is experienced in matching the appropriate cloud service to its capital markets clients.
Offering comprehensive Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) private cloud access, 24/7 support and monitoring, along with flexible payment plans to readily scale business up or down, Beeks helps customers focus with confidence on their core competencies.
Beeks Analytics as a Service (AaaS) provides an innovative, secure, dedicated and cost-effective analytics service that is tailor-made to the requirements of financial trading environments.
Beeks AaaS is an important element of cloud-based infrastructure service provision, helping organisations scale up rapidly and consolidate costs.
Scanning the complete data processing horizon from within one platform guarantees a unified view, preventing costly duplications and silo working.
Partnered with Beeks Cloud infrastructure, Beeks Analytics provides a level of performance insight that other hyperscale cloud providers would not be able to access.
Speak to one of our financial technology experts to learn more.
