A pilot done by online giant Amazon with two stock exchanges, the Singapore Exchange (SCX) and London-based Aquis Exchange showed that by moving share trading from expensive physical servers to cloud computing can not only save money and minimize the potential for outages.
Adrian Ip, a Director at Aquis Exchange’s technology arm said: “It’s proven to be technically capable, exchanges using the cloud to date for trading are limited in size or niche, such as dealing in crypto assets.”
Furthermore, Adrian said, Amazon’s move into “multicast” or an ability to send data to many parties at the same time in the cloud, a key requirement for any exchange of size, was a big breakthrough.
The Singapore Exchange (SGX), London-based Aquis Exchange and Amazon Web Services said they undertook a proof of concept to show that trading shares in the cloud can be sufficiently fast and reliable.
It is important to mention that even after spending hefty amounts on physical back-up servers, there have been outages in Australia, Japan and Europe.
Experts are of the view that a cloud-based system can be more sustainable than relying on physical infrastructure. This development comes when the regulators across the world are looking very closely at how these financial institutions are relying heavily on the third-party cloud providers like Google, Microsoft and Amazon for these services.
A cloud-based exchange could be more resilient than relying on physical infrastructure dotted across regions, Ip said. Mayumi Hiramatsu, Vice President at Amazon Web Services, said the pilot showed a path to free up customers from maintaining legacy on-premises infrastructure.
Aquis and SGX are looking to take things forward with Amazon and are hopeful that this can help them bring their savings up to 90%. “We will be looking at how this can be scaled globally. We will take a considered and measured approach and discuss with regulators and members,” Ip said.
The European Union is also aiming to come up with new laws to regulate cloud usage. On Thursday, Amazon said that last week it laid dozens of workers which were working on the e-commerce giant’s delivery drone project. It was done as a part of the reorganisation of the team.
The company has been working on a plan to deliver goods to its customers by using drones.
“We are reorganising one small team within our larger Prime Air organisation to allow us to best align with the needs of our customers and the business,” Amazon spokeswoman Kristen Kish said in a statement, without giving an exact number on how many employees will be sacked.
Kish said the company was working on finding roles for the employees effected by this.
