Looking to the Cloud: Visibility and Security via Cloud Services

WatersTechnology: A multi-bank theft in 2015 affected at least 100 banks in 30 countries with the criminals raking in as much as $1 billion in fraudulent transfers, while a security breach at Anthem resulted in 80 million patient and employee records being stolen. What can providers of cloud-based services do to reassure their financial services clients in this respect?

Brian Cunningham, global head of connectivity and integration, Bloomberg: Bloomberg has been in this space for 30 years. As a vendor that operates specifically in the capital markets, we can offer tailor-made solutions that have been honed through years of specific, relevant experience. In addition, we have been providing these capabilities with our own equipment, in our own global data centers, on our own private network and with our own multi-factor authentication for three decades. Nobody else can say that. We have clients in every major region around the globe, and hundreds of thousands of users within those firms are leveraging our services.

Encryption is key to securing and protecting client data, but providers such as Bloomberg have gone beyond that to introduce multi-factor authentication against our systems that include biometric security. This is not only used for data in transit, but also for data at rest. We segregate our infrastructure internally to protect the security of the client data, treating it separately from Bloomberg data.

Our own internal risk departments constantly probe and secure our systems, making improvements and protecting them from potential malicious attacks. By investing in annual independent audits to review our security mechanisms, we can also continue to remain ahead of any potential security problems.

WatersTechnology: Cloud architectures present an opportunity for increased business agility and cost savings. How can firms seize this opportunity while meeting the high-performance and stringent security requirements of global buy-side and sell-side firms?

Encryption is key to securing and protecting client data, but providers such as Bloomberg have gone beyond that to introduce multi-factor authentication against our systems that include biometric security. This is not only used for data in transit, but also for data at rest.

Cunningham: Naturally, security and performance are key issues to keep in mind when assessing how to seize the opportunities that cloud architectures can provide. At Bloomberg, our history and track record has proven that we can meet clients' needs in this respect - we have grown the largest execution system in the world. However, we also recognize the growing importance and need for robust integration solutions that will allow clients to not only use their own data, but also to integrate with Bloomberg to such an extent that our systems become part of their own local workflows.

Most of our clients ─ from small hedge funds right up to institutional money managers and global entities on the broker-dealer side ─ are now looking for hybrid cloud capabilities that will allow them to leverage a hosted capability from a vendor but make it behave with their own locally deployed systems as if it is locally installed. In response to this need, we have developed APIs and open standards that allow clients to integrate with Bloomberg in a way that makes our systems behave as part of their own local workflows.

The benefits of this are threefold. Firstly, it provides a seamless user experience, even though users may be interacting with multiple systems such as other third parties, proprietary systems or Bloomberg. Secondly, for firms with legacy systems that present too much operational risk to decommission, or proprietary systems that simply offer a better value proposition, multiple systems can be integrated to create a best of breed solution. Finally, hybrid cloud capabilities provide firms with the ability to implement a phased migration strategy so they can start to integrate solutions from a hosted managed service on an asset class basis or at a regional level across different desks in a more controllable manner.

WatersTechnology: Many firms use multiple proprietary and third-party systems globally and write custom software to allow these systems to interoperate. How can they gain visibility into these heterogeneous workflows across their global organizations?

Cunningham: Many systems contribute to an organization's workflow. For example, an external system such as an accounting package might act as a book of record, an internal system might be used to aggregate prices across all instruments, while yet another product might produce risk values. All of this information is critical to workflow. At the beginning of the day, an organization must be able to upload everything into its order management system to drive its trading activities. Users need access to a centralized solution that can aggregate all of those connections throughout the organization's global systems.

As a hosted managed service, Bloomberg can provide that centralized view, as well as the ability to monitor and aggregate that information. In offering this hosted managed service and by having a user interface that clients can log into in the form of a terminal, as well as web-based services, Bloomberg has concentrated on unifying those integration points and how we connect to the enterprise systems within our client's environments. Our users have access to a centralized experience from an operational perspective.

By leveraging our front end and proprietary message tracking capabilities, our users can monitor the health of their connectivity to Bloomberg data, feeds and integration points, but they also gain a transparent view of the health of their own systems. In this way, the solution allows a client to seamlessly integrate all of its systems with Bloomberg's infrastructure to create a holistic view of its operations.