Hedge Fund Cloud Summit Draws Crowd in New York

The atmosphere in the room was one of excitement and anticipation. Not something you’d expect for a conference dedicated to cloud computing? Think again.

We hosted our first-ever Hedge Fund Cloud Summit earlier this week at the Sofitel New York, bringing together over 100 operational and technology professionals from the investment industry for what truly was an exciting day.

Event hosts Bob Guilbert and Vinod Paul kicked off the afternoon by offering their perspective on the changes within the hedge fund market relative to cloud computing and why it has steadily become a reliable technology option for firms of all sizes and strategies. Five years ago, most hedge funds were involuntarily relying on traditional on-premise infrastructures marked by intricate Comm. Room build-outs and heavy upfront capital expenditures. The average cost for servers, storage, networking and other equipment? Two hundred to five hundred THOUSAND dollars.

As the industry has changed and technology has evolved, the cloud has emerged as a beneficial solution for firms looking to increase their efficiencies and reduce their CapEx. Hedge funds and investment firms are using the cloud in a multitude of ways and for a variety of reasons. We’ve come a long way from back in 2008 when respondents of an InformationWeek survey said that “cloud” was just a carelessly used marketing term.

But times have changed. And the Cloud Summit was the perfect opportunity for fund professionals on both the operations and technology levels to gather together and gain insight into some of the key cloud-related discussion point being heard throughout the industry. And, as expected, the most popular panel of the day was focused on cloud security.

We hope you share more insights from the Cloud Summit with you soon, but in the meantime, check out some of our expert panelists on display!  

Examining the changing role of the hedge fund CTO/CIO are Moderator Bob Guilbert (Eze Castle Integration)
and panelists Chris Turek (Evercore Partners), Doug Kline (Deutsche Bank) and Perry Vais (BlueMountain Capital Partners)
 

Discussing cloud security before the panel starts are Moderator Mike Abbey (Eze Castle Integration)
and panelists Eldon Sprickerhoff (eSentire), Steve Schoener (Eze Castle Integration),
Tom Smykowski (Goldman Sachs) and Elad Yoran (Vaultive/Cloud Security Alliance)

Photo Credits: Eze Castle Integration