Innovating on AWS for Securing a leading Financial Trading Platform
Recently, as our reliance on technology in the securities market grows, organizations are seeing more glitches that disrupt trading and lead to investor complaints. This is especially risky for investors with open positions, who might struggle to close them during market volatility.
To tackle this, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has worked closely with stock exchanges, clearing corporations, and trading members. Since some issues, like delays in moving to disaster recovery sites or cyber-attacks, cannot always be prevented by existing plans, stock exchanges now offer a contingency service to manage disruptions effectively. As a result, setting up the Investor Risk Reduction Access (IRRA) has become imperative for financial trading platforms. Trading platforms and stock exchanges fall back on the IRRA platform to ensure risk reduction for investors.
Enabling IRRA Implementation on AWS for Prominent Trading Platform
A leading stock exchange in India has witnessed a transformative journey, evolving into a cornerstone of India’s financial landscape. The financial trading platform acts as a key facilitator for companies seeking capital and investors looking for opportunities. Having introduced electronic trading and upon expanding its product offerings to include diverse financial instruments such as derivatives and mutual funds, the regulated entity ensures adherence to strict listing requirements and corporate governance standards, to garner investor confidence. Its global collaborations and recognition highlight its commitment to aligning with international best practices.
True to their excellent track record, the trading platform is a pioneer in setting up the IRRA designed to minimize uncertainty and ensure reliable business continuity. Implementing the model helps manage trading disruptions for broker trading systems, providing a dependable backup when other exchanges or trading platforms face issues, service unavailability, or disaster recovery failures.
After evaluating prominent cloud services providers, the finance services giant decided to engage Noventiq’s services taking into account comprehensive strengths in AWS, large scale implementations and cybersecurity capabilities.
Understanding Customer Objectives
Before aligning the solution to customer needs, Noventiq conducted a thorough analysis of the customer needs and goals:
- Time Cost Optimization for running IRRA production setup as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on AWS
- Leveraging AWS to run multicast applications only on cloud
- Adherence & compliance to SEBI regulated Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) on AWS.
- Control and automation to invoke/revoke the IRRA infrastructure setup on AWS as per exigency and non-exigency hours.
- Measurable Recovery Time Objective (RTO) to provision complete infrastructure in as is capacity on AWS for ensuring minimum downtime.
- Managed Services support with business level support on AWS post IRRA Production setup.
Custom-built Solution for a Pioneering Implementation
- Platform Setup: The IRRA production platform was implemented on AWS, following security best practices and using tools like AWS CloudFormation for auto-scaling.
- Network Configuration: The setup involved a centralized network architecture with robust security and traffic management. This included integrating applications via transit gateways and using advanced network segmentation for added protection.
- Traffic Management: Traffic management was optimized through the use of GRE routers and specialized gateways, ensuring efficient handling of multicast traffic and seamless connections for Disaster Recovery.
- Security: Comprehensive security measures were implemented, including firewalls, web application protection, and advanced monitoring and access management tools to safeguard against potential threats.
- Integration with ISVs like Palo Alto, Check Point, Trend Micro, F5, IBM and Cisco.
- AWS services like Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS CloudTrail, AWS CloudWatch Events, AWS Config, AWS IAM, AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Security Hub, AWS Direct Connect, and AWS Single Sign-On.
Leading Finance Platform Benefits from Unique IRRA Setup
Noventiq addressed the complex need from the well-established finance trading platform in a planned and structured approach, addressing all intricate aspects with a unique and comprehensive approach.
The IRRA framework ensures reliable business continuity and helps the client manage trading disruptions for broker trading systems with ease, providing a robust backup mechanism. The framework is exclusively functional on cloud, highly secure and adheres to best practices. It also ensures time, cost optimization and quick DR leading to reduced investor closing time during downtime.
The solution also enables high operational efficiency when the platform is down, enhanced security with restricted access and infrastructure resilience to potential attacks. As the IRRA is a collective initiative, it protects investor interests across various trading platforms and stock exchanges.
Post deployment, Noventiq has also been providing Managed Services for cost optimization, operational efficiency, minimum downtime and security.
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