The existing software used by sell-side and buy-side firms was designed for bare metal networks—and cloud networks work much differently, according to Brent Yates, CTO of SwXtch.io, a wholly-owned subsidiary of IEX Group.
This is especially true for firms in the financial industry, which rely upon these bare metal networks for speed and reliability, said Yates.
As these firms look to move more of their operations to the cloud, they are discovering networking blockers, he added.
“Often key features like multicast and PTP are missing. Packet loss, packet ordering, and clock synchronization is non-deterministic,” Yates told Traders Magazine.
“The result is that these firms will need to staff cloud network specialist and change their existing software,” he added.
To solve challenges of leveraging cloud networks, on Wednesday, October 26, IEX Group announced the commercial launch of cloudSwXtch, a new cloud-native software product that brings bare-metal on premises performance capability to the major cloud networks.
cloudSwXtch is a virtual overlay network that adds feature rich, high-performance networking to cloud or edge deployments.
cloudSwXtch unlocks missing network features that are required for demanding, high-throughput workflows.
According to Yates, cloudSwXtch “solves technical issues without requiring code changes” and provides an easy way to create reliable high-performance networks in the cloud.
Yates said that cloudSwXtch offers a number of features that are key to the financial services industry including zero-code change multicast, broadcast, and low latency within cloud networks.
cloudSwXtch also provides full visibility of data flows with metrics, packet capture and reporting in addition to facilitating ground-to-cloud and cloud-to ground for multicast traffic.
The biggest benefit of cloudSwXtch to financial services firms is that cloudSwXtch enables customers to bring their existing software to the cloud, Yates said.
“It enables QA/testing in the cloud for scalability and flexibility. It enables monetization of market data in the cloud. It enables scalable non-real-time processing of multicast data flows,” he stressed.
“Reliability and low latency are critical to the operations of firms in the financial industry. cloudSwXtch’s ability to provide these attributes in a high-performance cloud network is key to these firms’ digital transformation,” he added.
One of the other major benefits of cloudSwXtch is that it normalizes the network performance across the clouds (AWS, Azure, Google and Oracle), Yates said.
Last month, cloudSwXtch made its debut at IBC2022 in collaboration with Microsoft and Evertz Technologies, with a launch geared towards the media and broadcast industries.
cloudSwXtch is now commercially available on a global scale via the marketplaces of the major clouds.
“We are working with several large financial services firms globally. However, we are unable to provide additional details at this time,” he added.
“That said, IEX Exchange currently leverages cloudSwXtch for QA, testing, and to run certain software,” Yates said.
Over the past several years, IEX Group has been focused on building high performance, reliable, and scalable infrastructure.
The company received regulatory approval to launch the IEX Exchange in 2016 and has since become one of the largest securities exchanges in the world, trading nearly $25bn in transactions per day.
IEX has been building out a suite of technology offerings with the introduction of cloudSwXtch and the launch of Apperate from IEX Cloud.
IEX Group co-founder and CEO Brad Katsuyama, said: “At our core, we are a technology company and we are proud to have developed cloudSwXtch, which has the potential to revolutionize cloud networking for multiple industries.”
cloudSwXtch is available through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
The Company intends to add support for additional cloud platforms later this year into 2023, including Amazon Web Services, Google and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
