Cloud for Investment Management: Low-Latency Infrastructure for Trading and Research

Investment management cloud isn't generic enterprise cloud. Trading workloads need low-latency paths to exchange connectivity providers, market data vendors, and prime brokers. Research workloads need on-demand burst compute for backtesting that scales from one node to hundreds and back within hours. Client data falls under SEC examination scope with specific record retention and access control requirements. SOC 2 controls apply to anything that touches client portfolios. And the cost structure has to match a fee-based revenue model where cloud spend that grows faster than AUM destroys margin. Each of these requires architecture decisions that generic enterprise cloud migration doesn't make.

Investment management cloud done right is designed for the actual workloads. Trading infrastructure with cross-connect to exchange and prime broker networks, dedicated low-latency paths, and the redundancy execution requires. Research compute with autoscaling for backtesting workloads, GPU access for ML research, and the cost controls that prevent unbounded experimentation from becoming unbounded spend. Client data in environments with the access controls and audit logging SEC examiners expect. SOC 2 alignment from the start. Done with these workload-specific designs, cloud delivers for trading, research, and operations. Done as generic enterprise migration, it misses the requirements that actually matter.