Advancing our Journey to the Cloud

Founded 50 years ago, Nasdaq was built on a principle of disruption. It began with the electronification of markets, followed by a race to zero latency as volumes and investor participation exploded. Today, we take the next big step: I’m thrilled to announce that we are partnering with AWS to build the next-generation of cloud-enabled infrastructure for the world’s capital markets. We will begin by working with AWS to migrate our North American markets to a cloud environment, starting in 2022. From there, we will continue this journey across our markets, our exchange clients’ markets, and the broader financial markets ecosystem. 

As a market operator, we proudly serve millions of investors globally and the largest corporate issuers in the world with our highly advanced equities and derivatives markets. Our technology platform also powers more than 130 other markets across the world with mission critical trading, clearing, settlement, and surveillance technology. Because our systems are responsible for seamlessly transacting hundreds of billions of dollars a day, there are certain attributes that are crucial to successfully executing that activity in the cloud – hyper scalability, ultra-resiliency, highly performant down to the nano-second, and fairness for all participants.

Bringing markets to the cloud is a complex undertaking to say the least and for us, this step is many years in the making. Over the past decade, we systematically brought market services, such as data distribution, revenue management, regulatory reporting, and market operations systems into the cloud – all systems that are foundational to well-functioning markets. In more recent years, we’ve been focused on developing cloud technology that operates with the speed, precision, and reliability that investors across our 130 global markets have come to rely upon.

We are now ready for the biggest challenge of all – the matching engine. The technology that makes the market tick. We are positioned to take advantage of being at the center of innovation while delivering the best experience for our market participants. 

Just one of the innovations that make this transition to the cloud possible is the work we’ve done over the past two years with AWS to create ultra-low latency edge compute systems, specifically designed for capital markets. Leveraging the hybrid cloud capabilities of AWS Outposts, we can now bring the edge directly into our Carteret data center, creating the first ever capital markets private AWS Local Zone. This environment will be designed to enable us to maintain the performance, fairness, and resiliency of our markets and to create more scalability, security, and flexibility for us and our clients.  

And looking ahead, our partnership will also include opportunities to explore new ways to leverage AWS’s cloud capabilities across Nasdaq’s anti-financial crime, data and analytics, and market infrastructure software solutions. This is truly just the beginning. 

Our ambition is to become the first financial marketplace and solutions provider that is 100% cloud-enabled. With AWS as our partner, combined with our amazing technology talent at Nasdaq, we believe we have the joint team to make that a reality. 

Together we will redefine the future of the capital markets.