Nasdaq to Transfer Markets to Amazon’s Cloud

Nasdaq’s ambition is to develop into “a hundred percent cloud-enabled,”

Adena Friedman,

the corporate’s chief govt, stated in saying the transfer Tuesday at an AWS business convention in Las Vegas. “We’ll comply with with extra of our markets as we work intently with purchasers,” Ms. Friedman stated.

Nasdaq has beforehand stated that each one of its greater than 25 markets will probably be hosted within the cloud throughout the subsequent decade.

They embody six fairness markets in North America, together with the Nasdaq Inventory Market, in addition to six fairness by-product markets, the Nasdaq Baltic and Nasdaq Nordic markets, and fixed-income and commodity markets.

The financial-services sector has been slower to undertake cloud computing than different industries, stemming partly from the tight regulatory oversight of banks and exchanges, in addition to considerations over breaches of delicate shopper knowledge.

“To the extent that they don’t disintermediate their buying and selling companions and buyers, transferring to the cloud offers exchanges better flexibility, in addition to permits extra individuals to attach, permits individuals to attach simpler,” stated

Larry Tabb,

head of market-structure analysis at Bloomberg Intelligence.

Earlier this month,

CME Group Inc.

and

Alphabet Inc.’s

Google struck a deal to maneuver CME’s core buying and selling programs to the cloud.

Nasdaq already shops billions of transaction information in an information warehouse operated by AWS, together with each day orders and quotes transmitted by merchants. Through the years, the corporate has migrated quite a lot of companies to AWS, together with its income administration system for the U.S. and European markets. Its present relationship with AWS is an enormous cause Nasdaq stated it selected the Amazon.com unit to host its markets.

“We’ve got had a longstanding relationship with them,” stated

Brad Peterson,

Nasdaq’s chief expertise and data officer.

Cloud programs and apps are hosted on knowledge facilities operated by third-party suppliers, together with tech giants akin to Amazon.com,

Microsoft Corp.

and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. The programs allow customers to quickly scale computing wants, primarily based on demand, with far better ease than in their very own knowledge facilities.

Mr. Peterson has credited cloud programs for preserving Nasdaq from suspending buying and selling in January, when a frenzy for shares of

GameStop Corp.

and a handful of different corporations flooded standard on-line brokerages, precipitated a spike in market volatility and compelled many operators to limit entry to buying and selling.

He stated transferring markets to the cloud has the potential to supply the alternate with extra safety, better reliability and higher scalability, or the power to shortly energy up computing sources. Nasdaq and AWS might additionally create new cloud-based services and products for Nasdaq’s prospects, Mr. Peterson stated.

Scott Mullins, head of world-wide monetary companies enterprise growth at AWS, stated Nasdaq’s rising use of cloud programs is pushed by a necessity for elasticity and resilience to deal with market volatility, together with a whole lot of billions of buying and selling occasions each day. “In case you’re doing that on custom-made {hardware}, you’re going to should guess what your capability must be,” Mr. Mullins stated.

The 2 corporations have been working collectively to construct out Nasdaq’s cloud-based capabilities since about 2012, Mr. Mullins stated. “In case you get a invoice from Nasdaq right now, it’s coming from an information lake sitting in AWS,” Mr. Mullins stated.

“We’re solely going to do it at a tempo that works for us, AWS and our purchasers,” stated

Tal Cohen,

govt vice chairman and head of North American markets at Nasdaq.

Ms. Friedman stated the transfer introduced Tuesday facilities on the exchanges’ matching engines, programs that join patrons and sellers and deal with an enormous variety of worth quotes and trades, many submitted by high-speed buying and selling companies accustomed to having the alternate’s programs course of orders in millionths of a second.

Mr. Peterson stated that within the first section of the transfer, Nasdaq’s major knowledge heart for its U.S. equities and choices markets in Carteret, N.J., will probably be expanded and AWS will set up computing sources there. Merchants will probably be allowed to attach their servers to AWS servers the identical method they at present hook up with Nasdaq’s servers, he stated.

Write to John McCormick at john.mccormick@wsj.com and Angus Loten at angus.loten@wsj.com