Maria Korolov » Archive
Dark Clouds: Demanding an End to Outages of Online Services
In January, Salesforce.com’s “on-demand” services for managing customer relationships–popular with Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley other Wall Street firms–went down for about an hour. In the middle of May, Google went down for two hours, leaving users unable to access the search engine–but also email, documents and other Google services popular with small business users that were hidden in its widely dispersed computing “cloud.” Then, in early June, customers of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) cloud computing services were offline for more than four hours after lightning struck one of the company’s data centers. The portent of such problems used to make Bob Barry wary of cloud-based computing. For the president of Barry Capital Management Inc., … Read more »
Enterprise Risk Management: Getting Holistic
The recent financial crisis has demonstrated that securities firms need to change the way they approach risk, needing now to consider a wider variety of economic scenarios and to evaluate risk in an enterprise-wide holistic way. To date, most securities firms have focused on segments of risk, said Richard Thornton, a manager with the London-based PA Consulting Group, including risk adjusted return on capital, risk adjusted return on risk-adjusted capital and return on equity. “However, the credit crunch has highlighted that these approached do not work under stress conditions and fail to take into account internal systemic risks and correlation risk across portfolios,” he said. “They also generally fail to address funding and liquidity risks and their impact across the group.” Read full story at Risk Professional. … Read more »
Is It Safe In The Clouds?
Earlier this month, a hacker reportedly exploited a vulnerability in an Internet-based virtualization software platform that took down more than 100,000 Web sites and other applications. “That was an intrusion that was cloud-specific–it went through a virtualized vulnerability,” said Jim Reavis, founder of the Cloud Security Alliance, an industry group representing risk managers at financial and other firms. There haven’t been large scale reports of financial data losses due to cloud vulnerabilities, he said–but that’s because financial firms haven’t yet started using cloud computing for sensitive applications. The securities industry firms involved in the Cloud Security Alliance are considering using clouds–but not for regulated information, he said. “People are mostly in the architecture, pilot and strategy phase,” he said. Government agencies are also still in the … Read more »
How Not To Get Stuck In The Clouds
The promise of cloud computing is that a company can easily scale applications up or down, or move them from internal to external locations, to match demand, optimize performance, or lower costs. In practice, however, users may find themselves trapped in a relationship with a particular cloud vendor, unable to move applications to internal servers or other clouds without rewriting them from scratch. “Many of the customers we have spoken to simply assume that the cloud is open,” said Brian Goodman, IBM’s manager for cloud engineering and experience. “This is a common misconception because of all of the hype circulating around cloud computing.” And, while it might seem that vendors are the one who want to lock the customers in, in many cases it’s … Read more »
Where to Spend in a Time of Crisis
This article originally appeared in Securities Industry News. By Maria Trombly. Analysts, execs offer up ten key technology areas for smaller buy-side budgets Technology providers that cater to buy-side firms are knocking on doors in an industry that has seen widespread losses and sharp reductions in assets under management, as well as mergers, bankruptcies and outright frauds. According to Hedge Fund Research president Kenneth Heinz, 2008 was the worst year on record, with losses averaging 18.3 percent. Research firm Eurekahedge says assets under management fell from a peak of $1.9 trillion in 2007 to $1.5 trillion. But despite the financial damage, industry observers note that the buy side is still making select investments in technologies that can save time and money. Read original article (paid subscription required) . Did you like this article? Contact Maria Korolov … Read more »
Learning to Track Counterparty Risk
This article originally appeared in Bank Technology News. The dramatic fashion in which Bear Stearns and others have gone down in flames brings to the fore issues like counterparty risk management that had previously been undercounted, or not scored at all. The current market realities make implementing a new risk management platform in a hurry highly unlikely, but some banks are finding that their existing risk management platforms can be adapted to track new, or newly important, areas of risk with great efficiency. Kansas City-based UMB Financial Corp. was in just this position regarding counterparty risk, but executives were relieved to find that the Archer Technologies risk management platform they settled on five years ago could adapt to the new requirement. Read original article (paid subscription required). … Read more »
Standards Are Standing in Way of External SOA
This article originally appeared in Securities Industry News. By Maria Trombly. The promise of service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a world where everything interoperates seamlessly, pieces of applications are reused endlessly and development of new systems is quick, cheap and easy. But despite some high-profile deployments and the spread of Web services, when it comes to financial firms doing serious business with each other, SOA is being held back by competing standards and varying implementations. Wall Street firms use SOA internally to integrate applications, create employee portals that bridge silos, and build Web sites for customers that bring in information and tools from a variety of applications, both in-house and from third-party providers. Read original article (paid subscription required) . … Read more »
SOA at OppenheimerFunds
Originally published in CIO Magazine OppenheimerFunds used to have a data entry efficiency problem. Address changes that customers made on its website had to be manually re-entered into a variety of back-end systems before they went into effect. “Our business was growing — that was the good news,” said Geoff Youell, the firm’s assistant vice president of architecture. But due to the integration issues, the record keeping side wasn’t scaling very well. “There was a lot of retyping the same information multiple times into legacy systems,” he said. Read full article. … Read more »
All A Twitter Over Twitter
This article appeared in Bank Technology News, a reprint of an article that ran in Securities Industry News. New channels of electronic communication have been a boon to many industries, opening up sales and marketing opportunities, helping improve customer service and speeding up innovation and collaboration. For Wall Street, however, the benefits of technology such as Twitter have to be weighed against the compliance pains. Twitter, launched by San Francisco-based Obvious in late 2006 before being spun off, is a cross between an online discussion board and instant messaging system, allowing people to post short updates-capped at 140 characters-on their activities. Users can subscribe to each other’s updates, or tweets, and have them sent to their Twitter screens. Some Twitter posters develop armies of followers. Read original article (paid subscription required). … Read more »
Are Firms Ready for Twitter?
Article originally appeared in Securities Industry News. New channels of electronic communication have been a boon to many industries, opening up sales and marketing opportunities, helping improve customer service and speeding up innovation and collaboration. For Wall Street, however, the benefits of technology such as Twitter have to be weighed against the compliance pains. Twitter, launched by San Francisco-based Obvious in late 2006 before being spun off, is a cross between an online discussion board and instant messaging system, allowing people to post short updates–capped at 140 characters–on their activities. Users can subscribe to each other’s updates, or tweets, and have them sent to their Twitter screens. Some Twitter posters develop armies of followers. Read full article. … Read more »