In financial services, the move to the cloud is inexorable for banks, asset managers, exchanges and vendors, alike. The challenge is in figuring out the right path to take.

Trading workflow and communications platform provider Symphony Communications Services initially signed a deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud infrastructure provider. But after closer examination, executives deemed AWS to be too expensive and not the best partner for its desire to deploy AI-driven tools.

So in July 2021, Symphony announced a partnership with Google. It intended to begin migrating to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in Q4 2021. “The process is expected to take about a year to complete, and will see Symphony’s core platform run in Google Cloud, with some associated services that may still need to run on AWS,” WatersTechnology reported at the time.

More than a year in, the migration is “on point, on target and on time,” Brad Levy, CEO of Symphony, tells WatersTechnology today. But changes have had to be made.

“When you get into the reality vs. the plan, if you didn’t change anything, then you’re probably not right. … As we’ve gone into it for real and spoken with their engineers in depth, we’ve learned a few things and changed our plans in some ways,” Levy says. “That shouldn’t impact the timing, but will impact ultimately how and what we do, and when.”

This month, Symphony began migrating first smaller and then midsize users’ data into production on Google, says Dietmar Fauser, Symphony’s chief information officer.

When the partnership was initially signed, the idea was to migrate applications and data in parallel. After getting a handle on the project that was to come, and getting closer with Google engineers, Symphony decided to first get the data right on Google’s cloud, while also moving over some easier microservices, Fauser says, though the goal was never to “lift and shift from AWS to Google,” but rather to first establish, where possible, which processes and workflows could be automated.

“Currently, we are ending the full-blown testing of data migration from AWS to Google. That was a bit of a change in the project—to go with data migration first—because we have some technical debt with some old databases running on AWS. So we consolidated Bigtable and MongoDB running on Google. We are currently finalizing this. [This month], we will start the data migration in production onto Google,” Fauser says. “So overall, pretty good progress.”

Previously, Symphony was running multiple instances of the Apache HBase open-source database on AWS. But to improve performance and to save on cost by reducing the amount of human resources needed to oversee all those instances, the vendor decided to switch to a large, shared instance on Google’s Bigtable NoSQL database. He notes that Bigtable also provides a better geographical footprint and redundancy.

“We changed the approach a little bit in the sense that we started with the data migration first, which was not the initial plan, but we were running into an end-of-lifecycle issue with HBase. So we changed slightly and did this first, which had impacts on the initial plans. It’s a relatively complex thing that requires more coordination with customers than what we initially thought; it’s a little bit slower than what we thought at the beginning, but overall it’s progressing fine,” Fauser says.

Symphony’s video meeting dataflow service has been migrated to Google, as has its base infrastructure. Now Symphony is moving client data over to GCP from AWS.

Levy says the migration process will last into next year for the company’s larger tier-1 accounts. While the project isn’t necessarily onerous from an engineering standpoint, the hand-holding and changes to services require time and care.

“None of this is turnkey—the complexity sometimes comes in the configuration and how [clients] deploy and manage keys, etc. So we have to work with them very closely to do the migration,” he says.

Cloudy skies

Major cloud migration projects are not new to Levy. Prior to joining Symphony in 2020—first as president and chief commercial officer, and then as CEO in June 2021, replacing David Gurle—he was the CEO of MarkitServ, a platform that has been described as the nerve center of the post-trade market in derivatives. While there, he oversaw one of the more ambitious projects in the capital markets, as the IHS Markit-owned company launched TradeServ, a cloud-based platform that would eventually house its other platforms, including MarkitWire, Markit Trade Manager (MTM) and DSMatch.

As with any ambitious project, there were bumps along the way and lessons learned.

“I’ve been involved in a lot of migrations like this where it’s an applications and data,” Levy says. “You often get very far down the road and then you realize something is wrong with the data. So, we now work with the data first and then more of the applications second. Normally you’d get the application ready and then put the data in it, but this will make it a cleaner, more confident migration at the end because we know we’ll have the data right by the time we start making sure the applications work.”

Levy and Fauser hope the benefits will be tangible relatively quickly. They say that by switching to Google from AWS, in addition to improving performance and stability while cutting human labor costs, Symphony will be able to go to market with new products more quickly. Additionally, Fauser believes Google has a “different and much easier way to use the global network, which simplifies our operations and connectivity a lot. Data storage, and data management in general, are more advanced on Google, in my opinion. It allows for cost-efficient management of very large datasets. We use these capabilities for the databases but also for the [business intelligence] data that we collect and make available to customers on a large scale.”

While moving client data to Google is the goal right now, down the line, the partnership with Google will help it to expand in AI capabilities, specifically around machine learning and natural language processing. This will tie in nicely, they say, with the opening of a new R&D center based in France.

“As Google’s suite of apps is cloud-native, collaboration-enabled and used by many schools and corporates, we expect more demand over time to weave into workflows and connect via APIs/extensibility. Other capabilities in data science, AI, engineering and identity are also being considered,” Levy says. “AI is something we are trying to be thoughtful about and produce a platform that can deliver AI outcomes for our clients. We have an R&D effort we just launched in France that is very data-centric and ultimately looking to AI. So I’d say we’ve achieved the building blocks for this in the last year.”

But when it comes to using Google to build new analytics, encryption and AI tools, “it’s still early days,” Levy says.

Symphony is currently targeting mid-2023 for the full migration project to be completed—but as we’ve seen with the cloud, plans can change.