Category Archives: Financial Services
Remove the Restrictor Plate with High Performance Load Balancing
Similar to the way that a carburetor restrictor plate prevents NASCAR race cars from going as fast as possible by restricting maximum airflow, inefficient messaging middleware prevents IT organizations from processing vital business data as fast as possible.
Dodd-Frank Legislation and Structured Data Retention
The “Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act” has recently been passed by the US federal government to regulate financial institutions. Per this legislation, there will be more “watchdog” agencies that will be auditing banks, lending and investment institutions to ensure compliance. As an example, there will be an Office of Financial Research within the Federal Treasury responsible for collecting and analyzing data. This legislation brings with it a higher risk of fines for non-compliance. (more…)
Don’t Forget to Manage the Retention and Disposal of Data on Hadoop
According to an article written by Mark Brunelli interviewing James Kobielus of Forrester Research: Forrester’s Kobielus: It’s time for a Hadoop standards body, Hadoop is still a bit immature and needs adoption of standards. Mr. Kobielus goes on to indicate that when implementing Hadoop, “whether it’s through a data warehouse or Hadoop cluster, you’re talking about petabytes or multiple hundreds of terabytes worth of storage.” Hadoop, while designed to access these large data volumes (which can include social media data), does nothing to manage retention of that data. (more…)
Informatica Ultra Messaging Enables Early SEF Movers
In a recent post: Informatica Ultra Messaging Software Supports Capital Markets Reforms, I discussed the technology implications of the OTC derivatives (swaps) market moving to electronic trading as mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) in the US and the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) in Europe. One area where new technology infrastructure will be especially critical is in the creation and operation of “exchanges” for electronic swaps trading, similar to what is used for equities and other asset classes. In the language of the DFA, such exchange venues are called Swap Execution Facilities (SEFs) and are defined as “a facility, trading system or platform in which multiple participants have the ability to execute or trade swaps by accepting bids and offers made by other participants that are open to multiple participants in the facility or system, through any means of interstate commerce.” This of course includes capturing orders electronically, matching bids and offers, executing the trades, and providing connections to central clearing houses. And perhaps nowhere else in the new ecosystem is the expected growth in message volumes and associated need for new messaging middleware technology more evident than here. (more…)
Coping With The Data Deluge
UK banks and financial regulatory bodies are currently being flooded with customer complaints about Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) and struggling to cope with the data deluge. The Telegraph recently reported on how complaints around mis-sold payment protection insurance are pouring in to the Financial Ombudsman Service at a phenomenal rate of more than 800 day, creating an enormous data backlog.
With the final bill for PPI expected to top £8billion, banks are scrambling to increase the number of employees dedicated to claims and ramp up their IT systems. It is likely that some banks are now looking to sign outsourcing contracts, but there is uncertainty around this as the mis-selling of PPI is hugely complicated. (more…)
Addressing the Big Data Backup Challenge with Database Archiving
In a recent InformationWeek blog, “Big Data A Big Backup Challenge”, George Crump aptly pointed out the problems of backing up big data and outlined some best practices that should be applied to address them, including:
- Identifying which data can be re-derived and therefore doesn’t need to be backed up
- Eliminating redundancy, file de-duplication, and applying data compression
- Using storage tiering and the combination of online disk and tapes to reduce storage cost and optimize performance (more…)
Know Thy Customer
There has been much discussion, particularly in the UK, about banks restricting the use of their investment and retail arms. The thinking process behind this is that investment banking is much riskier and so by drawing a clear line between the two, consumers will be better protected if another financial crisis should hit. (more…)
Latency Matters, Even For Websites And Rich Internet Applications
In the past, the term latency has been largely ignored in the IT world, with the exception of network engineers and algorithmic trading experts. But today, there is compelling evidence that latency is an important metric for every business that runs a website, or that deploys Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), because even small delays in presenting data show a clear pattern of pushing customers and readers away.
Interesting data, replicated by multiple sources (including Bing, Google, and Amazon) show that slow-loading pages can cause the viewer to lose focus and potentially even click on something else, possibly never to return.
For instance, on search results, a delay of just .5 second chases away up to 20% of the traffic and revenue. As it says at this O’Reilly Radar post, “delays under half a second impact business metrics”.
Ultra Messaging Efficiency For Better Agility and Scalability
Our first post in this series on Efficiency covered the high-level performance benefits of super-efficient messaging software, whether you measure for latency or throughput, since efficiency is the property of software that provides performance. “Ultra-low latency” is just another term for extremely fast, lean, efficient execution. For more, see the post: Ultra Messaging is Also High-Throughput, High-Availability, Lower-TCO Messaging.
Our next post covered 24×7 availability, reliability and lower TCO from this efficiency. Less hardware and fewer software processes to touch the data in transit between applications provides these benefits. For more, see the post Ultra Messaging: For 24×7 High Availability, Lower TCO, and Robust Reliability.
This post discusses how the same Ultra Messaging efficiency that provides performance, reliability, and lower TCO also provides great agility and near-linear scalability. And with today’s Big Data challenges, especially in the capital markets, efficiency is more prized than ever.
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Ultra Messaging: For 24×7 High Availability, Lower TCO, and Robust Reliability
Our first post in this series (Ultra Messaging Is Also High-Throughput, High-Availability, Lower-TCO Messaging) covered, from a very high level, the performance benefits of highly-efficient messaging software by stressing that efficiency is the property of software that provides performance, whether you measure a single piece of data for “ultra-low latency”, or a large batch of data for throughput. Either way, ultimately, it’s all about extremely fast, lean, efficient execution. The way you choose to measure that performance is up to you, and depends on your needs.
But extremely fast, lean, efficient execution has other benefits for the customer besides performance. For example, the same Ultra Messaging efficiency that provides very high performance also provides the foundation for many of the key features of enterprise-quality software, such as true 24×7 high availability, lower total cost of ownership (TCO), and robust reliability. In the earlier post, we just touched on these topics, but here we will discuss them in a bit more detail.
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