Recently, FundsDLT was awarded the title of "Cloud Tech Innovator of the Year" by the Luxembourg chapter of Cloud Community Europe. Following this achievement, we take a look at FundsDLT usage of cloud for fund distribution.
The Cloud Tech Innovator of the Year award recognises our 100% cloud-based DLT platform for the fund industry. The annual Cloud Awards aim to reward originality, flexibility and transformation approaches to the cloud. Specifically, this award seeks to honour a company that leverages cloud computing in an innovative way to provide unique solutions to their clients—solutions that would not have been possible without the cloud.
Ananda Kautz, Member of the Management Board ABBL, Bernard Simon, CIO FundsDLT, Pierre Paci, Lead Cloud Engineer FundsDLT - ©Olivier Minaire / ITnation
At the awards ceremony on 16 May 2024, the jury highlighted FundsDLT's innovative use of cloud technologies and commended our platform's exceptional mastery of cloud computing, leveraging blockchain and decentralised networks to transform fund distribution. The award underscores our commitment to pioneering new standards and recognises our platform's transformative capabilities, enhanced security, and automation.
Receiving this award is not just a recognition of our past achievements but it also points to the forward-thinking approach we take towards technology. A crucial part of FundsDLT's success is our comprehensive and dynamic use of cloud computing. But what exactly makes our cloud strategy so effective and transformative for the investment fund industry?
Like all our use of technology, we aim to offer solutions that create new business use cases for our clients, ensuring they are cost-effective, resilient, and scalable. Cloud computing plays a crucial role in achieving these objectives by offering several key advantages.
©Olivier Minaire / ITnation
Firstly, the cloud significantly lowers costs by eliminating the need for expensive on-site infrastructure, allowing us and our clients to avoid substantial capital expenditures. Secondly, it ensures unparalleled resilience with data redundancy across multiple regions, which means operations can continue seamlessly even if one data centre fails. Achieving such resilience with on-site data centres would take years and incur prohibitive costs.
Lastly, the cloud enables rapid scalability, allowing us to quickly and efficiently meet the expanding needs of our clients. Without the cloud, scaling operations would require significant time and financial investment. By leveraging cloud technology, we can offer innovative solutions that drive efficiency and growth for our clients.
Scalable, secure, efficient: transforming distribution infrastructure
The foundation of FundsDLT’s innovative approach lies in its highly scalable and flexible infrastructure. By employing Microsoft Azure, we offer Software as a Service (SaaS) that ensures management, hosting, and accessibility over the internet. This model enables our clients to effortlessly scale their operations according to their needs, free from the constraints of physical infrastructure. Clients can access applications via a web browser, eliminating the need for client-side installations or downloads.
Security
Security is paramount in financial services, and at FundsDLT, we prioritise a multi-faceted approach to protect our clients' data. Identity security acts as a primary security perimeter, safeguarding systems, administrators, and credentials. This is complemented by robust measures to secure communications, data, and applications. Additionally, our infrastructure uses advanced tools and methods to detect and address vulnerabilities and attacks, while device management ensures that access to assets is controlled from trusted devices with strong security assurances. Our security operations centre uses Azure Sentinel for comprehensive incident detection, assessment, and response, ensuring continuous protection and security maturity.
Cost efficiency
With growing pressure on fees and margins in the fund industry, FundsDLT was built around the aim of greatly reducing costs. Cost efficiency is a major advantage of our cloud-based model. By eliminating the need for substantial upfront investments in hardware, we offer our clients a pay-as-you-go model that reduces operational costs and allows for dynamic resource allocation based on current needs. This efficiency enables them to invest more in innovation, so continuously improving services for all.
Microservices Architecture
Our platform is built on a microservices architecture, enhancing flexibility and reducing the risk of vendor lock-in. These microservices are deployed using containers and managed through Kubernetes clusters across multiple data centres. This architecture supports seamless integration with various cloud providers, ensuring robust and flexible service delivery. Automation tools streamline fund distribution processes, reducing manual interventions and increasing operational efficiency, which means faster, more accurate transactions and the ability to focus on strategic initiatives.
Global accessibility and resilience
Global accessibility and resilience are key pillars of our cloud strategy. The FundsDLT platform is designed to be accessible worldwide, ensuring consistent and reliable services across different regions. We use multiple Azure regions, including North Europe, West Europe, South East Asia, Germany, UK and France, and deploy our infrastructure across various availability zones to enhance resilience. Active-active data centres are located across different regions to minimise geopolitical risks and ensure high availability. The Azure Traffic Manager optimally distributes traffic across services, ensuring responsiveness and reliability. Distributed databases managed provide strong consistency and high availability.
In summary, winning the Cloud Tech Innovator of the Year award is a reflection of FundsDLT's dedication to transforming fund distribution through the use of advanced technologies. Our innovative approach and robust cloud strategy ensure that we provide scalable, secure, and efficient solutions that meet the evolving needs of our clients.
As we celebrate this achievement, we remain committed exploring what’s possible with cloud computing. FundsDLT will continue to explore new ways to enhance our platform, driving efficiency and growth in the investment fund industry
