Hedge funds are ramping up their use of clout computing, with business continuity planning an important driver.

Nearly nine in 10 investment firms are either using or planning to use the cloud, according to a recent completed survey by IDG Research and Eze Castle Integration. Fifty-four percent of survey respondents indicated improved DR and BCP was an important driver to cloud utilization. Nearly 93 percent of respondents feel that the private cloud is either more secure or just as secure as on-premise IT.

“A private cloud offers numerous value propositions and improved DR is one of them,” said Mary Beth Hamilton, vice president of marketing at Eze Castle Integration. “It is worth noting that not all clouds are created equal so firms must conduct due diligence to make sure they select a cloud environment that is highly redundant, built for availability and regularly tested and managed. We have also seen that investors want hedge funds to have their IT off-site to avoid single points of failure and increasingly prefer cloud-based IT.”

Hurricane Sandy reinforced the critical nature of having a communication plan that can be quickly initiated so employees and key stakeholders are prepared and remain informed before and after a disaster.
“Hurricane Sandy forced firms to take a close look at their disaster recovery and business continuity plans as well as those of their service providers,” Hamilton said. “Regulators and investors have also started focusing more on DR and BCP. The long-term impact we have seen post-Hurricane Sandy is that firms gained a new appreciation for the role that communication, preparation, DR testing and upfront due diligence play in DR and BCP.”

Cloud-based computing services have a compelling value proposition for hedge funds and other asset managers in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

“During Sandy, businesses throughout the New York metro area experienced a number of network and power outages when their critical infrastructure was not located in top tier data centers,” said Ben Gonyea, vice president of product management at Telx. “We find customers across all verticals, including hedge fund, looking at or deploying hybrid solutions consisting of colocation with Telx and leveraging cloud solutions provided by providers within our data centers. The advantage of locating their infrastructure in a carrier neutral facially is they can leverage access to a number of network and cloud operators to maximize their performance and reduce their overall TCO.”

All of Telx’s data centers stayed up throughout the storm and post-events. “As a result, we saw an increase in clients researching our colocation and business continuity solutions,” Gonyea said. “The long term impact is clients ensuring that their infrastructure is located in top tier data centers and prioritizing that investment to prevent another event negatively impacting their business.”