About Fidessa

Fidessa Group is a global business with scale, resilience, ambition and expertise - providing Financial Trading, investment and information solutions. 85% of the world's premier financial institutions trust Fidessa to provide them with multi-asset trading and investment infrastructure, market data and analysis, and decision making and workflow technology. $10 trillion worth of transactions flow across its global Network each year. Being a market leader, they also offer unique access to the world's largest and most valuable trading community of buy-side and sell-side professionals, from global institutions and investment banks to boutique brokers and niche hedge funds.

Solution 

Fidessa approached Exponential-e to solve this challenge after an introduction via one of its group companies, LatentZero which was already an Exponential-e customer. LatentZero knew of Exponential-e's technology and expertise and spoke highly of its potential to solve the automated failover challenge. Another key factor in choosing Exponential-e was its expertise in dealing swiftly with Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) applications.

At the start of the project Exponential-e helped by fulfilling the first requirement of obtaining Provider Independent (PI) IP addresses from RIPE NCC. To get Fidessa up and running quickly, a temporary subnet of Provider-Aggregatable (PA) IP addresses were provided by Exponential-e for the 100Mbps Internet connections installed at the primary office in Woking and the office in London. After RIPE NCC allocated Provider Independent (PI) IP addresses to Fidessa, Exponential-e smoothly facilitated the migration to the PI IP addresses from the temporary PA ones provided.

At the primary connection in Woking, a dynamic routing protocol was configured to be used during normal times. In the event of the primary connection failing, a floating, static route will automatically reroute the Internet traffic via the backup circuit in London.

The failover will then be managed by a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) session, where a lower metric is configured at Woking, ensuring it is the primary route, and a higher metric is configured in London, ensuring it is only used if there is a fault with the service at Woking. However, both locations will still be able to send outbound traffic independently as needed.

 Challenges

With so many major financial institutions relying on Fidessa and the company's commitment to providing resilient services to its customers, effective Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is imperative for the company. In a BCP situation the IT department might be dealing with ten or more different issues to resolve. Should there be a disaster, keeping resources free to resolve the issues that require manual attention is ideal.

Therefore, the challenge Fidessa faced was automating as much of its BCP as possible. Among the many Financial Trading tools and services that Fidessa provides, one of them includes delivery of web-based services, such as its award winning fragmentation analysis tools.

The company required resilient infrastructure to deliver these services to the international trading community and required automated failover to its London office in the event of a fault with the service at the company's head office in Woking.

The major problem Fidessa came across in trying to solve this challenge was that most providers did not have the technology or expertise necessary to provide automated failover in a BCP scenario.

After having dealt with a number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), needing to change IP addresses because of relocations and to become more flexible in the delivery of its web-based services, Fidessa first realised it needed to obtain its own subnet of IP addresses. Secondly, the organisation realised that the provider for Internet connectivity would need to have Network reach combined with innovative technology and know-how to deliver an automated, seamless failover between Woking and London.

Two of the world's largest communications providers were approached; however, Fidessa determined that neither organisation was flexible enough nor could they provide the type of failover desired to ensure minimum impact during a disaster. These providers required manual intervention and changes to Fidessa's core Network for failover to occur between the Woking and London offices.

This was not ideal to fulfil the company's Business Continuity plans - time and effort needed would be labour and resource intensive - taking away from where these resources could be used in a disaster situation.

About Morningstar

Morningstar, Inc. is a leading provider of independent investment research in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. The organisation offers an extensive line of products and services for individuals, financial advisers, and institutions.

Morningstar U.K. opened in London in 2000 and launched its investing website in 2001. The website offers access to objective information on more than 9,000 funds available to individual investors in the U.K

About Tandem Money

Tandem is 'The Good Green Bank', a fully regulated digital app‐based bank founded on the idea of putting customers' needs first whilst helping them save more than just their money by pushing for a sustainable future. The acquisition of green lender Allium in 2020, an established green homes lender, accelerated Tandem's mission into the green space. Tandem offers savings, mortgages, and loans to help customers green their properties, and eventually their lives.

Challenges

The key driver behind Tandem's ongoing digital transformation was earning a full banking license in 2018 - something that had been a core focus of their infrastructure's evolution. This meant their infrastructure would need to fulfil all legal and compliance obligations around the handling of financial data, and also demonstrate the highest standard of operational resilience.

At the time, Tandem's IT and telephony infrastructure was hosted at various separate data centres, while their banking application was hosted on AWS services, and a separate site set aside for workplace recovery. Although multiple sites were involved here, the whole network depended on the London office, creating a single point of failure.

After a comprehensive evaluation of various suppliers, Tandem engaged with Exponential‐e to ensure these critical elements could be securely interconnected in order to maximise performance and scalability and ensure all requirements for full bank status were achieved. Exponential‐e's deep experience in the financial sector was critical here, providing Tandem with complete confidence that the partnership would provide a positive contribution to their journey.

Solution 

The networking solution delivered by Exponential‐e interconnected all Tandem sites via a high-performance WAN - a fully managed low‐latency solution that ensured consistent performance across all sites. This was implemented by a dedicated Exponential‐e account team, who project managed every stage of the deployment to ensure there would be no service disruption and that Tandem's long-term goals remained the primary focus throughout the deployment and beyond.

Critically, this fulfilled all compliance requirements regarding the handling and storage of financial data, while ensuring Tandem's teams would have the right tools at their fingertips at all times. To ensure a disruption free migration process, secure connections were created between Exponential-e's self‐owned network and Tandem's AWS services, allowing for a successful consolidation of the different elements of their infrastructure, and providing IT teams with a higher level of control and visibility.

As the partnership between Tandem and Exponential‐e evolved, a combination of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and Office 365 was established as the ideal combination of solutions to further optimise Tandem's overall efficiency and enable effortless collaboration between their various teams, regardless of where they were located, with security policies applied automatically and role‐based segregation opening up a wide range of opportunities for remote working.

Throughout 2020, when the COVID‐19 pandemic forced organisations worldwide to rapidly transition to a remote workforce, the inherent flexibility and scalability of Tandem's infrastructure and a robust business continuity plan showed its true worth, as the entire workforce were able to begin working remotely with minimal disruption to day‐to‐day operations, and no compromise in terms of security and compliance. This option had already been utilised on an ad‐hoc basis by Tandem's engineers, but a scenario where it would need to be utilised on a company‐wide basis had been considered and factored into the business continuity plan, with tests taking place to ensure such measures would be viable, should they ever be needed.

In this way, Tandem has demonstrated how the right infrastructure, with the support of the right technology partner, provides organisations in even the most challenging sectors with the agility to pivot in response to unexpected, large‐scale shifts in the digital landscape. Tandem's long‐term digital transformation continues, with plans in place to bring its core banking suite in house and into the Cloud, for a further layer of control and flexibility.

About Odum Research

Odum Research creates pricing, risk, and execution strategies for a wide range of financial market challenges - particularly around crypto derivatives - drawing on leading-edge technology and the collective experience and expertise of their own financial experts.

Challenges

Solution 

Following a thorough evaluation of Exponential-e's capabilities and experience working with financial organisations and their highly specific cyber security requirements, Odum selected Exponential-e as their new technology partner. This involved a series of in-depth meetings between teams from both companies - including both consultants and technical specialists from Exponential-e - in order to develop a bespoke solution wrap that would not only suit Odum's immediate requirements, but also provide ample scope to scale and evolve in response to future shifts in the digital landscape.

As part of the wider cyber security ecosystem, the decision was made to utilise the Okta platform to manage user authentications and ensure all financial data would be handled in line with all applicable regulations. Exponential-e supported the roll-out of the platform, ensuring it would be properly integrated with the wider infrastructure.

This close cooperation between teams proved crucial to the success of the final deployment, with Exponential-e's consultants working closely with Odum's own IT specialists to ensure the move to the Cloud and rollout of the Okta platform was achieved with zero disruption to day-to-day operations - vital in the fast-moving financial markets - and without compromising security or compliance.

As a result, Odum are now equipped with the technology and expertise to fully embrace the Cloud, utilising cutting-edge technology to drive ever more innovative financial strategies that help maintain their edge in a dynamic, constantly evolving sector.

The support from Exponential-e made all the difference when it came to getting things up and running. We were able to make use of everything more or less straight away, and I was able to sleep a bit more easily knowing our security was all in order.

Jack Concanon, Head of Technology, Odum Research