Exchanges, like banks and hedge funds, are among those on Wall Street starting to see the benefit of moving part of their operations to the public cloud. But venues migrating their entire infrastructure to the technology still seems like a pipe dream to some.
Edward Tilly, CEO of Cboe Global Markets, told Business Insider in an interview that while he sees the benefit of moving his exchange group's data into the cloud, shifting other parts of the trading venue off premises could be a tough sell.
Specifically, he said moving the exchange's matching engine, which links buyers and sellers of assets, would be difficult.
"I scratch my head on matching," Tilly said. "At this point, it seems very aspirational. That doesn't mean it's a bad thing. Data, I totally get that. But matching, I think that might be a little bit of a stretch."
Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman recently said she sees exchanges moving to the cloud over the course of the next decade. As a result, Friedman said, the markets could operate more holistically as opposed to each exchange operating in their own data centers, separated from each other.
The issue with using the cloud to match trades lies in the speed at which the remote servers could handle the orders. Cloud-based service has more latency than on-premises hardware, said Bryan Harkins, the cohead of markets division at Cboe. In the stock market, where fractions of a second are the difference between millions of dollars in profits, the lag from using the cloud would be disruptive.
As for if Cboe has any plans in place to move data to the cloud, Tilly declined to comment beyond reiterating his belief in where he sees the potential benefits in data storage. Harkins added that the path towards using cloud technology around managing data is much clearer.
"Storage, yeah, you can certainly cut out a lot of expenses by moving all of your data infrastructure to the cloud," Harkins said.
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