Exploring Cloud Services for Hedge Funds (Seminar Recap Part 1)

By Kulvinder Gill | Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

Last week, the Eze Castle Integration team in London hosted their final breakfast seminar of the year looking at Cloud Services for Hedge Funds.

The seminar featured a panel of experts:

Simon Eyre, Service Director at Eze Castle Integration
Andrew Kaufmann, European Business Development Manager at Viteos
Christian Nilsson, Head of Investment Solutions - Practice Lead EMEA at Thomson Reuters

So much information was covered at this event that we’ll be publishing three articles on what was discussed. First up (in this article!), we’ll look at IT outsourcing with hosted services. Next, we will cover outsourcing middle and back office operations.

What are the technical advantages of hosted services over on-premise solutions?

For smaller funds, advantages include:

Gaining access to enterprise level technologies that improve resiliency and disaster recovery options
Reducing internal IT staffing requirements

Larger funds receive the above benefits as well as:

Expanded remote connectivity options that are delivered with hosted offerings
Rapid scalability and flexibility, which allow faster implementations when compared with physical hardware
Reduced requirements on the IT team to maintain renewals, licensing and warranties
Allowing internal IT resources to be focused on strategic technology initiatives

What are the cost advantages achieved with hosted services?

Significantly less equipment to be purchased, which delivers numerous benefits including reducing initial capital expenditures
Reduced Comm Room or Data Room requirements within the office, which means expensive office space and resources (i.e. HVAC) can be allocated to revenue producing functions
Hardware refreshes are handled by the service provider behind the scenes and costs are built into the service agreement so the client pays little to nothing for the tech refresh
Firms gain instant access to the latest technology solutions

What is the impact of hosted services on an internal IT department?

Dependencies on specialist IT staff (Networking, SAN Engineer, Virtualisation) are reduced
Current staff can focus on solutions and applications that add value to the business rather than hardware support and maintenance
Ownership of software upgrades and maintenance is the responsibility of the hosting provider and built into the monthly costs