From private, to public to hybrid Cloud solutions, for some time the financial services industry has been abuzz with interest regarding how to securely and efficiently leverage Cloud computing to solve increasing computational and regulatory demands. In the past, we’ve discussed the challenges and advantages surrounding managing big data and bursting to the Cloud for compute power—in addition to harnessing hybrid Cloud strategy and the impact of regulations and risk management on Cloud approaches.
Today, mounting regulatory compliance pressures in the financial services and insurance sectors continue to rapidly fuel the need across financial services firms for calculating more granular, compute intensive risk metrics in as close to “real-time” as possible.
This is now, more than ever, driving firms to leverage high performance servers and Cloud computing in a whole new way – bursting compute-intensive calculations to private, public and hybrid Clouds.
In fact, the 2014 State of the Cloud Survey released by RightScale® Inc., reports an uptick in overall Cloud activity this year as follows:
- 87 % organizations using public Cloud
- 94% organizations are running applications or experimenting with Cloud
However, this same survey also reports that the industry will continue to face challenges for some time as institutions address different levels of Cloud maturity:
In addition, many people in the front or middle offices of financial institutions have viewed Cloud Computing as “something my IT department or software development teams deal with,” and not a technology they directly use or benefit from. Indeed, this is not the case.
In fact, some large enterprise systems are already Cloud-enabled, accessing public or hybrid Clouds such as Microsoft Azure, in order to distribute and speed up calculations. However, this process is largely (and purposely) hidden from the system users.
With Microsoft Excel often the powerhouse behind the front office trading desk, these same users use spreadsheets extensively—and often have business-critical spreadsheets which take a long time to calculate. Important decisions often hinge on the results, and delays because of slow compute times or errors can have a significant business impact.
For more details and specific case studies on increasing calculation speeds and cost-effectiveness using the Cloud, check out our recent webinar*, ‘Using Microsoft Azure with Numerix Spreadsheets: Supercharge Calculation Speeds and Get Faster Results.’ The study highlights how Numerix Spreadsheets can be connected to the Microsoft Azure Cloud to dramatically reduce calculation times and provide faster results and better decision-making.
*Please note that this webinar case study is for Numerix users only.
You can also read more at numerix.com about Risk Technology and the Cloud.
