Hedge funds and investment firms are leveraging cloud computing for archival, compliance, and hosted apps.

Eze Castle Integration, a provider of IT services to hedge funds, has increased its cloud computing customer base to more than 130 financial industry firms, as the company works to deliver a range of apps and services via the cloud.

“Hedge funds need to determine whether to provide IT services in-house or outsource them,” Bob Guilbert, managing director of Eze Castle Integration, told Markets Media. “We can provide, via a virtual private cloud, the IT infrastructure without the attendant costs of building and maintaining it internally.”

Eze Castle Integration’s private cloud services portfolio includes horizontal, enterprise apps such as office, voice, archiving and backup and recovery, as well as vertical application hosing for order management, portfolio management, accounting, and research management. In addition, it provides FIX connectivity to market data providers such as NYSE Euronext, SunGard, and Thomson Reuters.

Scalability and costs are the main reasons why hedge funds are choosing to go cloud. “Using an outsourced service provider allows a hedge fund to put its money to work in the capital markets rather than tying it up in infrastructure costs,” said Guilbert.

The cloud model is a pay as you go model, which means that allocation of CPU, memory and storage resources can be adjusted to address a fund’s needs, said Guilbert.

The Eze Private Cloud employs VMWare ESX servers to virtualize server solutions, and virtualized storage from NetApp to segregate tenant’s data. “When funds are selecting cloud providers, one of their paramount concerns is the privacy and security of information,” said Guilbert. “The Eze private cloud provides segregation at the storage, switch, server and firewall levels. All measures have been taken to provid4e a secure multitenant design.”

Eze Castle has opened its New Jersey-based data center at QTS, an expansion driven by demand for cloud services. Via that facility and others, Eze Private Cloud delivers secure cloud-computing offering with multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) between data centers, said Guilbert.