Beeks Launches Proximity Cloud

Beeks Financial Cloud has unveiled Proximity Cloud, what it says is a fully-managed and configurable compute, storage and analytics rack built with low latency hardware to allow capital markets and financial services customers to run compute, storage and analytics on-premise.

The service supports Unicast and Multicast datasets, and has been uniquely developed for capital markets and financial services, the firm says, adding that while managed cloud service providers offer generic cloud computing solutions, Proximity Cloud has grown out of the knowledge, expertise and experience of exclusively supporting financial trading companies.

“We’ve got a long and unique history of delivering on-demand compute in financial services,” says Gordon McArthur, CEO at Beeks Group. “We know the pain points our customers encounter, and Proximity Cloud is our most comprehensive offering to date. We aim to eliminate some of the risks and a lot of the costs that come with in-house infrastructure solutions and to make it a lot easier to get value to the business.”

The system has the ability to be deployed in a client site, which Beeks says means the data remains within the client environment resulting in enhanced security and reduced data sovereignty issues. It adds the service has been purposely designed for connectivity-rich environments and comes with physical and virtual compute capacity built in and racks that can be combined to scale capacity up and down as required.

“Up until now Beeks has provided a private cloud product with a level of shared network infrastructure hosted in the Beeks’ domain,” explains McArthur. “Although we were having great meetings with banks and the bigger financial institutions who love our message and our agility, we kept bumping our head against the issue of internal controls using shared networks.

“The shared infrastructure platform was causing problems with security, data access and data sovereignty,” he continues. “These may not be so significant in the generic cloud, but they are show-stoppers in the financial sector. Replacing shared infrastructure through a dedicated, client-owned environment was key.”

The platform can be hosted by Beeks within any of the world’s financial data centres. “Proximity Cloud enables us to deliver the product in any location,” says Alan Samuel, head of sales for Beeks. “Our customers don’t have to locate it in LD4 or NY4. They can have it in their own building in London, New York, Singapore or literally anywhere in the world they require it to be.”

Beeks is keen to stress the maturity of the product’s core functionality, with McArthur saying, “All the components within Proximity Cloud are tried and tested over the last decade. We are one of the only firms in the world with dedicated expertise in building, networking and automating private virtual machines and analytics for the financial markets.

“In that sense Proximity Cloud is not a new product,” he continues. “It’s an iteration of all the components we’ve spent the last ten years building and automating, all brought together in a plug-and-play package. What is new is the software layer that brings all the components together and enables point and click management through a brand-new user interface.”