Organizations across industries around the world are reaping the benefits of the cloud and in turn, generating significant business value. Some are at a mature stage in their cloud-adoption journeys, while others have just started.

Within the capital markets industry, exchanges are starting to adopt cloud for core services, such as moving data-related trading platforms to this virtual environment.

Singapore Exchange or SGX Group—the Singapore-based market infrastructure, with service offerings across multiple asset classes from equities to fixed income, FX to commodities—is in this cloud-transformation drive, while remaining true to its core values.

“We want to retain the strengths that our market participants trust us for, which are reliability and availability, and at the same time, embrace the improvements that the cloud can bring to the transformation and future-proofing of business models,” says Tinku Gupta, Chief Information Officer (CIO), SGX Group.

She continues: “There are many use cases in the cloud, and we are deep into it. Some of our platforms are running on the cloud and we are working on more that will harness the benefits of cloud.”

Cloud ambitions

SGX Group is looking towards the cloud to benefit from extended reach, capability building and platform modernization, as well as for achieving sustainability benefits.

To achieve these goals, new platforms being built from scratch are nearly all cloud-native and Gupta and her team are constantly looking at opportunities to migrate existing workloads to the cloud, where relevant. Operating in the cloud will help extend the reach of these services, while taking advantage of all the other benefits the cloud has to offer.

According to Gupta, SGX Group’s cloud strategy is built around five core pillars: cloud first, cloud only, cloud move, cloud agnostic and cloud later. These are the foundation of the exchange’s aim to reap the benefits of the cloud.

She explains: “When moving new and existing workloads to the cloud, the approach we take will depend on what we require of that platform or workload. Our strategy is to make sure that the platform has the relevant functionalities that the customer of the platform requires, even when operating in cloud. At the same time, we ensure that the cloud provides all the security by design architecture needed to operate securely.”

Utilizing data in the cloud

Effectively utilizing data, consolidating it from various silos and gaining insights from it through AI and machine learning (ML) is a major business benefit of the cloud.

At the same time, data is also the crown jewel of an organization and it must be protected.

In Gupta’s role as CIO, protecting the data and understanding where to store it is as important as utilizing it to drive innovation and transformation.

"The requirements of confidentiality, integrity and availability of the data define where the data should sit, whether on-premise, in the public or community cloud,” she adds.

SGX Group is working with HCLTech to capitalize on this to create new products and services.

“We have been working with HCLTech for over a decade and the partnership brings together their strengths in operationalizing and operating platforms and the trust and efficiency that we are known for. Moving into this cloud environment, it’s now about how we work together to build this whole ecosystem to continue to provide the same level of service and innovate together,” says Gupta.

Looking ahead to 2030: Industry cloud and sustainability

The concept of industry cloud is likely to accelerate in the next 5 to 10 years, according to Gartner’s recently published hype cycle.

Industry cloud platforms will have the ability to combine traditional cloud services with tailored, industry-specific functionality to address historically hard-to-tackle vertical challenges.

To reach their full potential, industry clouds will need to evolve into something best described as ecosystem clouds.

“Cloud-transformation partners will need to look at contextual cloud services across the entire ecosystem, from an operation and participation perspective and it will be good to explore opportunities that industry cloud platforms can bring to our capital markets industry,” says Gupta.