The stock market is all about speed. How quickly you can execute a trade can represent the difference between millions made or millions lost. Everyone is looking for an edge – and leveraging a reliable and fast trading platform certainly supplies one.
In today’s volatile financial landscape, the Intermapper solution* can make all the difference in preventing outages and keeping operations running smoothly – even on the busiest of days.
At a global financial services company, Intermapper helps to provide that significant competitive advantage. This piece explains how Intermapper is used to deliver a dependable experience for the company’s clients.
*The former VCM is now in the Intermapper product family as Intermapper Foresight. Learn more about the Intermapper product changes.
The Need for Proactive Capacity Management in Finance
The initial problem was clear: This firm was relying on employees to identify and report shortages in capacity. By the time employees alerted IT leadership to low storage, delays in service had already occurred.
The lack of a formal capacity management process was hurting the business, and an enterprise-wide solution was needed. After researching a cross section of capacity management solutions, Intermapper Foresight was identified as having the capabilities that were needed – and at a reasonable price.
How Intermapper Foresight Earned an Enterprise-Wide Launch
Electronic trading requires an infrastructure that can deliver swift order execution. If the application built on top of the infrastructure was not behaving optimally, it wouldn’t matter how much hardware was thrown at it.
The company sought to evaluate Intermapper Foresight on a smaller scale before performing an enterprise-wide rollout. An application that represented a typical level of infrastructure dependence was selected for proof of concept.
In this proof of concept deployment, Foresight successfully pinpointed capacity needs and eliminated the threat of service outages and slowdowns stemming from the application. The success of Foresight’s initial launch demanded an enterprise-wide implementation of the solution.
Intermapper Foresight Integrated Numerous Data Sources Seamlessly
“Intermapper Foresight is only as effective as the quality of the data inputted. In our case, the data was dispersed across various locations.” – Company’s Managing Director.
Within the company, there were multiple repositories of data that were largely independent of one another. In such instances, it’s common for IT to have infrastructure data but lack configuration management information that’s necessary for providing complete context in assessing what areas are being impacted by service issues.
Those with access to infrastructure data may be able to identify systems experiencing performance issues, but they don’t know what specific applications are being affected. "In our company's scenario, this scattered data is not useful unless it can be determined whether it impacts the online trading system, account reconciliation, funds management, etc."
By integrating configuration management information and infrastructure data, Foresight provides the context necessary to relate IT infrastructure performance to the applications they’re supporting. "In capacity management, the phrase 'Garbage in, garbage out' is pertinent. Primarily, you must source the data accurately, and [Foresight] facilitates this effectively."
Intermapper Foresight Strengthened the Firm’s Reputation
“Before Intermapper Foresight, we were flying blindly in terms of whether we had sufficient capacity or not. With Foresight, we can stay ahead of service disruptions caused by traffic spikes. Take CrowdStrike for example. On that day (July 19, 2024), everyone was impacted. But the firms, including ours, that were ready to do business at the start of the day were rewarded for their resilience.”
With Foresight, you can be sure that capacity will not be an issue even on the most disruptive of days. The solution allows you to simulate the stress placed on your machines produced by periods of high trade volume. If more capacity is needed, Foresight’s “What if” analysis determines the required CPU.
Major events that impact the stock market present firms with an opportunity to prove their reliability and set themselves apart from the competition. In the days following CrowdStrike, this firm passed with flying colors. “Clients want a firm that performs on tough days. Foresight gives firms a competitive edge.”
See Intermapper Foresight in Action
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