More than eight out of ten investment firms in the US are using or planning to use cloud computing, many of them to bring down IT infrastructure costs.
A survey of 125 senior-level executives found that 85% of respondents wanted cloud computing to reduce infrastructure costs, while 83% of them wanted ‘the cloud’ to help increase the speed of technology deployment and 82% intended to simplify their IT management.
Cloud computing is where users access computing and data storage through a gateway to a data centre operated by an external organisation with multiple customers.
Developments within the European asset management industry over the past year have included Advent Software, which in May announced that it had put trading, corporate actions and other products onto a cloud platform. In April BT Radianz announced that it had connected its cloud to 40 more hosting centres to bring trading counterparties closer together. The Irish Stock Exchange began to distribute its data across the BT Radianz cloud in March.
Eze Castle Integration, an IT firm, conducted the ‘Cloud Adoption Trends in the Investment Management Industry’ survey and found other benefits sought from cloud computing included improved access to resources on-demand, and the ability to take advantage of built-in disaster recovery functions.
An additional finding of the survey was that seven out of 10 respondents ranked concerns about security as well as information governance and meeting regulatory requirements as significant barriers to cloud deployments.
Of the 125 executives contacted in the survey – many of them hedge funds – 45% of them worked at firms with more than $750 million (€599 million) in assets under management.
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