C LO U D S E R V I C E S THE FINTECH TIMES
Proximity Cloud The latest Cloud product evolution specifically designed for finance markets
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o coincide with its end of year results 2021, Beeks – a managed Cloud computing, connectivity and analytics provider in global capital markets and financial services – launched its latest product evolution, Proximity Cloud. Since 2011, Beeks Group has honed its infrastructure provision and software development approach in direct response to its customers’ needs and requirements. Its mission, under CEO Gordon McArthur, is to deliver ultra-low latency compute power, ensure maximum security and optimise performance in the exceedingly fast-moving capital markets sector. Proximity Cloud is a pre-configured trading environment platform dedicated to the demands 14
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of capital trading markets and financial institutions.
UNIQUELY TAILORED FOR FINANCIAL MARKETS
While managed Cloud service providers offer generic Cloud computing solutions, Proximity Cloud has grown out of the knowledge, expertise and experience of exclusively supporting financial trading companies. “We’ve got a long and unique history of delivering on-demand compute in financial services,” says McArthur. “We know the pain points our customers encounter and Proximity Cloud is our most comprehensive offering to date. We aim to eliminate some of the risks and a lot of the costs that come with in-house infrastructure solutions and to make it a lot easier to get value to the business.” Edition 41
PRE-BUILT SOLUTION
Proximity Cloud is a low latency private cloud product pre-built into a physical cabinet and delivered to site in a stand-alone rack. It comprises the whole range of functionality to be expected from Beeks private Cloud, including resource management automation, full stack and trading analytics, packet capture, latency monitoring, high precision time services and support for MultiCast and UniCast datasets. The problems that Proximity Cloud helps to solve are far-reaching and include everything from security risk to opportunity blocks, measuring performance analytics and reducing local supply chain issues. “Up until now Beeks has provided a private Cloud product with a
level of shared network infrastructure hosted in the Beeks’ domain,” explains McArthur. “Although we were having great meetings with banks and the bigger financial institutions who love our message and our agility, we kept bumping our head against the issue of internal controls using shared networks.” The shared infrastructure platform caused problems with security, data access and data sovereignty. While these may not be so significant in the generic Cloud, they are showstoppers in the financial sector. Replacing shared infrastructure through a dedicated, client-owned environment was key.
LOCATION FLEXIBILITY
Not only do financial organisations wish to deploy quickly in new
trading regions globally, they also have their own data centres where they wish to have control of their infrastructure. Commenting on the flexibility of Proximity Cloud, Alan Samuel, Beeks’ head of sales, says: “Our other products to date have been prescriptive in terms of location. Our customers have had to engage with Beeks Cloud within our own footprint in our global locations. Proximity Cloud enables us to deliver the product in any location.” Proximity Cloud doesn’t have to locate in LD4 or NY4, customers can have it in their own building in London, New York, Singapore or literally anywhere in the world they require it to be.
INTEGRATION
Things can change in the financial sector very quickly
and financial markets need optimised systems that flex under load and market demand. Proximity Cloud lets customers to adapt and scale up or down without having to fork out a substantial amount in CAPEX. Financial businesses who have attempted their own infrastructure builds know only too well the pain of integrating low latency, virtual compute with analytics and execution engines. So many banks and brokers have invested a great deal of time and money on platforms that never got off the ground. Not only that, it’s likely that successful implementations would be compromised on some area of security or performance monitoring. The value of Proximity Cloud over alternative Cloud providers lies in its
