Taiwan-based IBF Futures, an arm of IBF Holdings, has started using Nutanix’s cloud platform to offer customers a more secure and improved trading experience, the company said.
IBF Futures provides a platform for international and domestic futures trading with services in eight foreign future exchanges including London, New York and Chicago.
Investors in Taiwan are able to trade outside the country and in different time zones using the platform.
Parent company, IBF Holdings’ deputy GM for IT, Chao-Hsin Liao, said IBF Futures needed to modernise its IT systems to streamline the customer trading experience.
To do this, Liao added, the company sought to cut its reliance on physical machines and free-up space on-premise, and in doing so “reduce its carbon footprint”.
With stricter regulations from the Financial Supervisory Commission in Taiwan, the company also needed to implement two-factor authentication and needed a flexible and scalable cloud-based platform, Liao said.
He said implementing Nutanix’s solution also helped IBF Futures “make better use of resources by streamlining IT manpower and operations”.
Liao added that the company’s workload has technically increased since implementation, but the size of the IT team had not changed.
“Nutanix Prism dashboard helped save IT personnel time on routine maintenance, (and) it also offered insights which facilitated the process of customers opening new accounts,” he said.
Dashboard
When demand is high, the dashboard indicates the need for more resources, prompting the front-end team to deploy more virtual machines to address customer requests, Liao added.
He noted that Nutanix AHV made it possible to deploy virtual machines (VM) applications “within the space of approximately 30 seconds”.
“The equivalent server deployment used to take at least one month,” Liao added.
He also added that Nutanix HCI helped deliver the rapid deployment of an SMS one-time password system, “a secure authentication method developed by IBF Futures to help customers enhance security”.
The shift to Nutanix HCI makes it easy for the IT team to expand capacity according to transaction volume, he said and added that it had reduced total cost of ownership “by saving 65 percent of storage and 95 percent of machine space, helping advance towards its ESG goal of achieving carbon neutrality”.
“It’s our goal to become a leader of digital applications in the trading and financial industry… Since adopting Nutanix’s services, we have saved significant time and manpower,” Liao said.
He added that as the company’s business continues to scale over the next three to five years, “Nutanix’s cloud platform will be key to helping us succeed”.
Laio said this year, the company plans to launch a cloud strategy system, “a service built on Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure”.
“Users will gain access to historical transaction data on the platform that will support their investment decisions,” he said.
Laio said nearly all IBF Futures transactions now run on Nutanix with the help of the consulting partner Acer AEB.
