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About three years ago the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) began plotting a migration to Amazon's cloud. Most companies when they do so target low-hanging fruit: Applications that can be relatively easily lifted and shifted to the cloud.
Not FINRA. "We started with the migration of our most critical systems to AWS," explains Steve Randich, executive vice president and CIO of FINRA, and a former CIO of the NASDAQ stock exchange and Citibank. "We moved our most mission critical, data-intensive services first." Randich called them FINRA's "crown jewels."
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FINRA records every order and quote in the New York Stock Exchange daily. That's about 75 billion individual events per day. FINRA processes in one day the magnitude of data that Visa and Mastercard process in six months, Randich says.
FINRA stores this information so that it can analyze trends over days, weeks and months. That amounts to trillions of records and about 20 petabytes of storage. FINRA's IT "center of gravity" is now in Amazon Web Services, he says.
Why...