Nasdaq launches Amazon-based financial cloud

The world's second largest stock exchange, Nasdaq, has launched a cloud storage platform aimed at replacing in-house financial management systems with a central and secure option for traders and investment banks.

FinQloud, established as a subsidiary of Nasdaq OMX, would offer the services based on a mix of the company's existing private data centres and Amazon Web Services facilities in what the company claimed would drastically reduce operational and regulatory costs for storing financial transaction data.

The stock exchange planned to offer two distinct cloud services; Regulatory Records Retention for meeting US regulatory information retention obligations, and Self Service Reporting (SSR), enabling fast analysis and reporting on stored trading data.

SSR, the company said, would specifically allow companies to crunch through petabytes of trading data to compile custom reports based on historical trends or current information.

It did not reveal pricing.

However, Nasdaq claimed utmost security of the services, using its private data centres as a secure gateway to data stored in AWS. It would not "co-mingle exchange and non-exchange resources" at its facilities.

"We will continue to work with AWS on cloud technology offerings that foster transparency and improve the quality of our markets," said Eric Noll, executive vice-president of transaction services at Nasdaq OMX.

FinQloud is expected to become fully available over the next few months.

An FBI investigation into Nasdaq OMX's policies last year found lax security measures led to a breach of systems in 2010.