Managed services delivered via the cloud are rapidly becoming the model of choice for financial firms that are anxious to shed layers of costs that have enveloped their in-house proprietary systems over the years.
It’s a dramatic change, for only a few years ago the idea of moving mission-critical systems to the cloud was only dimly perceived as having potential.
“Some of our biggest clients are in the process of moving from a deployed, clunky environment to our dedicated hosted environment,” said David Hagen, vice-president of global trading technologies at technology provider Linedata.
“Four years ago, the idea of the cloud was foreign to them.”
Linedata delivers its entire front-to-back office solution as an integrated, hosted offering. Customers that use its hosted services run the gamut: hedge funds, mutual funds, third party administrators, pension funds, custodians and insurers.
Firms using Linedata Hosting are able to lower their cost of ownership and enhance their returns on investment with systems that are kept up to date, available and managed by Linedata’s industry experts.
Among the tangible benefits of a cloud-based model is the opportunity to stay up to date with the latest software.
“Inevitably, clients tend to be on older versions of a vendor’s software,” said Hagen. “With a hosted environment, it stays up to date because we control it.”
Hosted platforms, which range across cloud-based models including software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), offer improved reliability, availability, scalability and security, in addition to cost savings.
PaaS, by providing a computing platform as a service, enables users to develop software using tools and/or libraries from the provider. The user also controls software deployment and configuration settings. The provider provides the networks, servers, storage and other services.