Wall Street watchdog moves to cloud, big data, to boost capabilities

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Herbert Lash.

A Wall Street regulator has begun to migrate its surveillance and other watchdog duties to cloud computing, which in combination with crunching big data, will dramatically boost the organization’s capabilities, two officials at the agency said. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority began using cloud computing at the beginning of this year in a roughly 30-month roll-out that will save FINRA $10 million to $20 million annually while making the agency operationally far more agile.

By moving to the cloud, FINRA will gain increased processing capacity and more space to store data, while reducing costs because the service is only used when needed, Steven Randich, chief information officer at the agency, said in an interview. Technology is key to FINRA’s mission to oversee brokerage firms, monitor the U.S. stock market and protect investors from potential fraud. Wall Street’s industry-funded watchdog monitors trading in almost 6 billion shares daily for abusive activity…

In the past, increasing capacity and storage cost more money. FINRA, which processes 25 billion "market events" a day, had hit the limits of what is commercially available, Randich said…

Read more from the source @ http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/06/20/finra-technology-idINL2N0P105020140620