Point Of View
Monday, 10 December 2012 22:21
High Resolution Visibility and Rapid Analytics- Ready When You Are...
Written by Nick Carus, Consulting ServicesOrganisations a are now demanding better visibility about what’s going on externally in their market and internally within their business to maximise growth , improve competitiveness and decision management. The end goal is increased organisational agility in order to be able to deal with change fast.
High-resolution management, a term originally coined by University professors, describes an operating theory whereby managers frequently drill down on data to the nth degree and use that granular information, now available to them, for the very same objectives as in lean manufacturing - increasing quality of service delivery and lowering costs at the same time.
Breakthrough technologies, combining extreme data performance and actionable insights are now facilitating this highly effective and pervasive management style at the business level to support business analytics, so organisations are naturally focussing on their operational technologies to deliver the same kind of efficiencies
At the operational level, how can managers provide 100% end-to-end Traffic Visibility & rapid analytics ?
Today’s enterprise organisations have numerous large and complex IT initiatives that are putting greater strains on infrastructure managers to provide reliable and accurate high-resolution information on exactly what traffic is traversing the corporate network at any instance. Providing this level of information is critical to each component of the business in ensuring that user and customer application service-levels are maximised and maintained to ever-higher levels of standards. Gaining access to 100% of network traffic is also essential for successful trade flow analysis, forensics research, bandwidth management and network analysis.
IT initiatives focussed around the move to the Cloud are aimed at reducing and controlling IT operational expenditure, and maximising the efficiencies of the entire corporate IT infrastructure. To realise these aims and objectives, total end-to-end visibility, control and management of network traffic is critical to success. Without it, planning is prone to error and risk, production support levels will be impacted, and troubleshooting made more complex and expensive.
Corporate profits, brand-value and competitiveness are all at risk without total network visibility and analysis. You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and you can’t measure what you don’t see.
For these very reasons, the business is making aggressive demands of IT to make rapid changes in how traffic is measured, managed and reported upon. The huge challenge for IT is how to effectively orchestrate the monitoring of the entire end-to-end corporate infrastructure and provide, on-demand, the increasingly high resolution data that different business units require to run their business efficiently.
The traditional method of deploying large numbers of probes and analysis tools at strategic points across the network is fast becoming impractical.
Some of the main issues impacting this approach are:
• Limited number of monitoring “SPAN” ports available
• Capital expenditure cost of the number of devices required
• Cost of supporting & maintaining the number of devices required
• Resources & time required to administer the tools and analyse/interpret the data they deliver
• Scale and complexity of gaining full visibility across physical & virtual IT platforms
• Dynamic nature of business introducing changes to end-to-end path of application network traffic and changes to traffic profiles
• Limitations with tools in providing required levels of data resolution in reports
As a result, the Enterprise organisation has to make severe compromises in how much of that “total visibility picture” it can provide the business. The implications of this to the business are already critical, with the nature of the problem only getting more severe as the organisation pushes ahead with new technologies designed to make the business more competitive and cost-efficient.
An effective solution to this dilemma is needed fast so we hve looked at the provision of a High Resolution Visibility & Analysis (HRVA) platform
Through the careful adoption of aggregation devices and application-aware network monitoring and analysis tools, we can provide a simple and elegant platform solution to the specific problem of how to facilitate end-to-end, high-resolution network visibility, flow control & analysis across all physical and virtual infrastructures. If implemented with careful consideration to the needs of the business, these technologies can help deliver the precise quality of data and information business managers are now demanding to run their companies’ operations efficiently.
Providing that data and information with enhanced speed, agility and resolution of detail will provide a dramatically improved perspective of the business, and will have an important impact on how managers make decisions.
Why?
Because with access to complete, relevant and more accurate information, management will be able to move freely from macro to micro levels and will be able to measure, plan and act accordingly. The HRVA platform is analogous to a magnifying lens on your operational infrastructure. It is one of an increasingly growing umbrella of solutions supporting high-resolution management practices.
The HRVA solution can be integrated into any corporate network infrastructure to enable a very efficient and effective method of providing full access of all end-to-end network traffic from the desktop environment through to the back-end servers and storage infrastructure. It will provide the scalable, high-performance platform that facilitates the efficient and effective deployment of application aware monitoring, analysis and reporting tools and technology that can capture all end-to-end network traffic throughout the corporate network. The solution overcomes all of the issues that prevent IT operations in monitoring, analysing and reporting on the activity of all business-critical applications simultaneously.
As illustrated above, traffic streams are mirrored from the networks and infrastructure into a Gigamon Traffic Visibility Fabric, an innovative architecture that delivers pervasive and dynamic visibility of network traffic traversing communication networks. On entering, packets can be accurately time-stamped with either microsecond or nanosecond accuracy clocks for latency sensitive environments. Data is then filtered, using a unique patented Flow Mapping technology, and is intelligently segregated into different logical groupings, removing unwanted information, based upon L2, L3 or L4 parameters, applied to incoming and outgoing traffic streams. This information is then forwarded to Riverbeds Cascade Shark and Pilot platform for complete packet capture, long term storage, granular deep packet analysis and visual, multi –level reporting.
The plug-and-play architecture of the integrated solution deploys easily in complex environments, providing network administrators with the vital insight they need to proactively and effectively govern IT infrastructures and ensure continuous availability of servers and applications.
Operational efficiencies are being realised within organisations by adopting the HRVA platform thus allowing managers to continue to see, measure, plan and act successfully. With complete visibility, granular resolution and rapid analysis comes more options to drill down on your vital business information to the nth degree, eliminate inefficiencies and cut costs.
Organisations have the ability to do something about it now as the technology is ready and available.
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Tuesday, 07 August 2012 23:22
Visual Analysis- A Valuable Tool For Uncovering Market Abuse
Written by Stephen Piron, Consulting Services
At the time of writing, the financial press is awash with news of the LIBOR scandal. Yet again certain market participants have run afoul of the rules, further soiling an already spotty faith in markets.
Perhaps it’s true that, as long as there are markets there will be those who won’t play fair. But there is particular urgency now, at a time when banker is synonymous with crook in the public mind, and in light of new legislation (MiFID, Dodd Frank, etc). Regulators and compliance officers need to be especially vigilant against abuse.
Data visualization and visual analysis -organising data in ways to leverage the ability for the eye to instantly spot patterns in multiple domains, is being used in a variety of financial applications. Visual analysis of order book data is used by market makers to enhance and monitor their strategies. It’s used by execution algorithm designers to improve execution and reduce slippage. Visualization is used by risk professionals to assess and mitigate portfolio risk. Real time visual TCA (Transaction Cost Analysis) often adds a layer of understanding and leads to insights not uncovered in traditional statistics-based TCA alone.
Visual analysis is particularly suited for HFT as a higher frequency of transactions generates more data, and more noise out of which to decode signal. And this particular advantage of a visual approach– the ability to deal with lots and lots of data- is as important for finding signal as it is for finding abuse.
Regulators are confronted with enormous amounts of data from a variety of different sources. The key to dealing with so much data is to arrange it visually so that impropriety instantly sticks out - the way a rotten grape is easily recognizable from a bright purple bunch. Such intelligent data arrangement is one way regulators can use visualization to stay a step ahead of abusers.
The real benefit is that visualization is versatile. Regulators have the ability to choose how to look at data and what to focus on. Allowing exploration of data means regulators can be nimble, as market abusers will always be looking for new ways to break the rules.
Historical and real-time visual analysis has been shown to identify potential abuse such as front running, trade washing, IPO collusion, marking the close, painting the tape, and placing orders with no intention of execution, among others.
Competent regulation requires that professionals be resourceful, and use many analysis techniques. Data visualization should only be one technique in a regulator’s toolkit and can act as a compliment to incumbent systems such as NASDAQ SMARTS.
To their credit regulators and compliance departments are very eager to talk about new technologies that might help them, including visualization technology. There seems to be a great urgency in the industry to snuff out abuse by any means necessary.
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Tuesday, 04 January 2011 22:29
Perform - Transform - Manage. A business mantra for Capital Markets?
Written by Attova Business ServicesMarket Insights for 2011 and beyond- A fine balancing act...
Over the past few years, the capital markets community has spent a large proportion of its time on cost-cutting initiatives, divesting non- core divisions and focusing on operational efficiencies.Meanwhile, on-going regulatory measures and changes, continued market fragmentation and the rate of change of technology advancement mean that the dynamic within financial markets is now gravitating towards high performance, business transformation and risk/cost management. As liquidity continues to fragment, firms within capital markets are expanding certain trading operations, adopting new HFT strategies to seek alpha, whilst demonstrating best execution.
These developments present challenges on both business and technology fronts.
From a business perspective, market participants must implement the right types of business transformation initiatives and remain performant, whilst deploying processes that comply with the rules mandated by these measures. On the technology side, firms need to enable innovative and flexible technology platforms to take advantage of the new trading methodologies whilst managing the explosion of market data volumes and risk/compliance processes that directly result from these new initiatives.
High Frequency Trading is now a globally recognised phenomenon and game changer. Along with the evolution of automated market making, HFT firms are dominating in the supply of liquidity. Policies that enabled automated trading in the first instance have naturally enabled HFT so the jury is out as to how policies can best be implemented to curb its natural evolution. Either way one has to look at “cause and effect” within the markets and the policies and processes firms need to adopt just to ‘stay in the game’, depending on what end of the frequency trading spectrum they reside. It is highly likely that new rules and regulations will appear in 2011 to address a number of concerns although there is still some debate as to how global regulators will react.
It’s a fine balancing act so who to turn to and what to focus on in order to maintain competitive advantage?
On the business side, the relatively new discipline of Technology Economics continues to gather momentum within capital markets, championed by pioneers in thought leadership such as Dr Howard Rubin from Rubin Worldwide in the US and Dr John Pettit from the Centre for Technology Economics in the UK. The technology intensity within financial markets demands that business models must accommodate technology imperatives. By providing the latest information business leaders need to master technology investment strategies and understanding how technology can be applied to enable new business models, organisations applying and subscribing to this discipline will continue to maintain that competitive edge.
Financial markets also need to be accommodating open innovation business models alongside the traditional closed approach. The old paradigm of a closed innovation, efficiency driven, product focused and proprietary business model needs to accommodate the new paradigm of open innovation, growth driven, customer integration, service oriented and flexible business models in order to rebuild trust with their clients, shareholders and the various regulatory bodies.
An imperative for innovating companies is that they can and should use and embrace external as well as internal ideas, use internal and external paths to market, in order to maximise returns from their transformation and innovation initiatives. Opening up business models in financial markets will continue to be challenging but is an opportunity for those that understand the importance of this strategic change. By adopting flexibility and continuing to on-board service-oriented open business models to transform, participants can quickly adapt and redefine themselves as markets and client behaviours have already changed considerably. To embrace open innovation for competitive advantage, business leaders must adopt a new set of management practices. As much as an agile or dynamic infrastructure aligns business and IT process and infrastructure, the business culture should be ambidextrous ( pursuing different contradictory strategies at the same time) in thinking, foster an ‘intrapeneurial‘ mind-set and take a holistic view on the firms business operations.
Businesses need to ensure that they partner with the right professional services organisations as part of a collaborative process to discuss key business initiatives and how IT can influence business value- these partners understand how to apply open innovation and ‘know how trading’ through a flexible network to deliver benefit to their clients . Understanding Technology Economics plays an important part in guiding how business leaders can use technology with modelling techniques to make investment decisions to transform their business.
On the Technology frontier, adopting the latest technology imperatives to accommodate advanced trading initiatives whilst building a dynamic infrastructure and optimising operations continue to be a top priority for many CIO’s.
Across these focus areas, improving data integrity and the quality of data continues to be of paramount importance as the pressure to provide a consolidated financial view grows in order to meet regulators demands for reporting and transparency. Those firms that can access complete sets of data across the business enterprise will have an advantage when addressing the regulatory requirements. Improving data integration has long been a priority for financial firms, but the need to provide accurate risk measurement across the enterprise, as well as the need to be able to respond to regulators’ requests for reports in a timely manner, increases the importance of the quality of the data.
Enabling a Dynamic Infrastructure will also provide firms with an advantage. With intelligent monitoring and adopting service oriented processes and technologies to streamline information availability, correlation, processing and reporting, organisations can integrate risk functions across all departments. With the right adoption of cloud services, more applications can be moved into the cloud. Market participants can optimise the allocation of their resources and maximise performance whilst minimising and avoiding cost. A large percentage of capital markets firms already use some type of cloud service and an increasing number will being to adopt the service throughout 2011. The elasticity and ability to scale up and down with speed is clearly an attractive proposition for many firms. The alternative management community are adopting cloud for CRM and online back up and hedge funds are seeing the benefits with back testing in risk analytics and high frequency compute requirements. Firms within capital markets are likely to initially build their own internal clouds within their own data centre and firewall environments.
Data centres represent the backbone to financial markets so the ability to optimise operations is fundamental in facilitating business transformation and managing cost. Low latency colocation services are a given but design considerations must also need to demonstrate the highest levels of security, robust connectivity, flexible configuration models and ultra-low latency to market data.
Organisations that can embrace these new business models and collaborate with the right partners in the above technology focus areas will continue to be the next business leaders and maintain competitive advantage.
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