GCP – Deutsche Bӧrse Group continues its journey to the cloud

The word “transformation” brings many things to mind, like innovation, agility, and change. Consistency and stability are probably not as high on the list of synonyms, but for regulated industries undergoing digital transformation initiatives, those characteristics are just as critical—in fact, they’re critically important for digital transformation to succeed.

Deutsche Bӧrse Group, an international financial exchange organization offering products and services that cover the entire value chain, plays a role in contributing to the soundness of the global financial system. It is a prime example of how a large company in a highly regulated industry can achieve a delicate balance between innovation and stability. The company sees cloud as an important enabler, supporting its strategic focus on new technologies and helping to keep it on the forefront (of technology) while maintaining its own highly secure, resilient, trusted infrastructure. 

Under the leadership of CIO and COO Christoph Böhm, Deutsche Bӧrse started its cloud transformation journey more than three years ago, bringing on strategic partners like Google Cloud to advise and support it during the process. Midway through what has been a tumultuous year for organizations and people around the world, Deutsche Bӧrse has made significant progress in its growth strategy, most recently adopting Google Cloud VMware Engine to extend and migrate its on-premises workloads to Google Cloud. 

The best of all worlds

A central part of Deutsche Bӧrse’s growth strategy is to maintain an agile, sophisticated IT infrastructure that spans a wide range of on-prem and cloud apps, as well as multiple cloud platforms. This multi-cloud, hybrid environment helps Deutsche Bӧrse keep the stability, resilience, and control required within a highly regulated environment—without sacrificing the scale, speed, and agility needed to stay ahead of the market and service evolving customer needs.

Deutsche Bӧrse has a long list of on-prem VMware applications across its portfolio that have been customized over the years for the company’s unique processes. Many of these applications, especially in the business’s post-trading side, could benefit from the cloud. Using Google Cloud VMware Engine, Deutsche Bӧrse is now migrating these apps to the cloud without the cost or complexity of refactoring applications—in most cases, with just a few mouse clicks.

The ability to run and manage workloads consistent with its on-prem environments reduces the team’s operational burden and enables staff to continue using existing skills, tools, policies, and processes that comply with the company’s stringent regulatory requirements. The exchange’s hybrid, multi-cloud approach also helps with choice and portability to avoid vendor lock-in and gives the IT team another option for disaster recovery. 

Deutsche Bӧrse’s developers are also benefiting from the company’s move to the cloud. According to Böhm, using cloud services has significantly sped up development and testing of new customer-facing services. Prior to this, the team had limited testing capabilities, but can now conduct thousands of tests across three or four environments in the same amount of time, allowing for earlier identification of errors in the development process. By moving VMware workloads to Google Cloud, Deutsche Börse can set up a new private cloud instance in minutes, while maintaining existing policies and tools, including existing cloud constructs such as networking interconnects—all while increasing business agility.

In general, the use of cloud services has kept teams fully productive, especially during the peak of the global COVID-19 pandemic, when 95 percent of teams were working remotely. Böhm attributes many of these benefits to scaling in the cloud. He also highlights Google’s AI capabilities and comprehensive machine learning framework. Hyperscaling machine-learning services will enable Deutsche Börse to train data science models in a couple of hours rather than weeks, a huge improvement in supporting Deutsche Börse’s ambitions to further automate internal processes and provide new data-driven services to customers faster than before—in a secure way. For the company, ensuring the security of the data has always been a top priority: a powerful data privacy strategy is applied to all public cloud activities in place, enabling two layers of encryption. From the very beginning, the strict privacy and data security measures Google Cloud is offering and applying were a critical factor in deciding for Google Cloud.

Like many companies on their paths to the cloud, Deutsche Bӧrse is not finished with its journey, proving that cloud transformation (or any transformation, for that matter) doesn’t happen overnight. However, the cloud’s productivity benefits and speed of innovation have already prepared the company for the future, without placing too many demands on the present.

Learn more here about how Deutsche Börse Group is adopting Google Cloud to lay the foundations for scalability, resilience, and compliance.