Nasdaq’s Move to the Cloud Gains a New Sense of Urgency

Traders love to see when stocks are going “To the moon.” Well now, they are moving to the clouds.

Nasdaq, like many companies around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic, has made an increasing effort to move to public cloud infrastructure. In fact, Nasdaq plans on moving all 28 of its markets to the public cloud, rather than relying on on-premise data centers.

The demand for market data in the US peaked to more than twice its previous record in March and Brad Peterson, Nasdaq’s CTO and CIO, told The Wall Street Journal that the data warehouse handled them fine. But the staff working at those data centers had to manually increase the exchange’s capacity, which demonstrated the difficulty of adding capacity relying on traditional infrastructure, rather than cloud.

Nasdaq already planned on moving all 28 of its North American and European markets from data centers to clouds before the infiltration of COVID-19. But the pandemic was a stern reminder of the importance of this transition. The company plans on having all 28 running in the Cloud over the next decade, Peterson told The Wall Street Journal.

Nasdaq is far from alone from making the move to the Cloud. Companies such as Netflix and Zoom had smooth transitions as traffic patterns shifted dramatically during the pandemic, and the public cloud helped make that possible.

Many companies that embraced cloud technology before the pandemic had some of the greatest success over these months. And now, more and more companies are either starting to transition, or ramping up their timelines to become more cloud orientated.

With some of the top tech companies in the world -- such as Amazon and Google -- offering public cloud services, the days of traditional data centers are coming to an end. The pandemic reminded the world the importance of swift and flexible action. The public cloud helps leverage open-source software and minimize operational overhead, leading to better results.

Is your company making the move to cloud? If not, what are you waiting for? Atlas7 would like to help guide you through this process with some of the top partners in the business. Schedule a time to increase functionality and prove how the cloud will give you an advantage over competitors still relying on traditional data centers.