As most market data executives find themselves stranded at home dealing with homeschooling and remote meeting challenges, they probably ponder which 2020 initiatives they can actually work on. 

Market data projects are hard to complete remotely. Accessing physical terminals is now impossible. Anything involving hardware deployment or colocation facilities work must be postponed avoid putting employees at risk. Playing with the data itself is difficult when many firms still struggle to provide working laptops to their confined employees. 

Not to mention how futile some of those activities may seem as so many struggle with the sickness or the loss of loved ones.

But the recovery will be coming, and with it the realization that the transition to a market data infrastructure that does not depend on any physical presence is unavoidable. Market data is indeed more valuable than ever, and its flawless delivery in an pandemically volatile market is even more critical. The cost savings will be pretty darn important too.

Our business is 100% cloud-based and we have been pleasantly surprised by all the gratitude our clients have expressed for its resiliency--as if it has not been the case for many other aspects of their business. For instance. AssetMark said, “With all the disruption, it is a genuine comfort that we have not seen any performance hits in our product, thanks to Xignite.”

As firms shift their capital spending from on-premise hardware to cloud there is a set of projects that market data managers should focus on right now and reprioritize for the post-pandemic world, it is the transition of their market data infrastructure to the cloud. 

Because such migration involves no code changes and no physical or software deployments (thanks to Xignite’s unique emulated APIs), you can complete a PoC in a matter of days and walk away with a good grasp of the savings such optimization with drive (typically 25% to 50%, which based on your spend could amount to millions of dollars).

The actual migration itself can be done remotely. Face-to-face meetings are not needed. All the steps required to complete such migration can be completed in weeks.