Abacus Watches the Private Cloud Business Grow
by Abacus Group, on Jun 22, 2012
By Jake Thomases, June 21, 2012 Buy-Side Technology
Abacus managing director Chris Grandi sat down at Sifma to talk about his customers and the private cloud business.
Acceptance of private cloud has moved significantly over the past 12-18 months, says Chris Grandi,
managing director at Abacus, a private cloud infrastructure provider for hedge funds. Even a year ago he was getting a lot more doors shut in his face.
The reasons have been articulated before. Hedge funds kept their "secret sauce" on their servers and didn't want anyone else touching them. They also believed they could keep better tabs on the security of their data real time gps tracker for iphone and android by housing them within their own walls. But they are starting to realize that data center security is better than they thought, and their own mobile spy sms free track phone security is worse.
"Now people have gotten a better comfort level that even with all this equipment sitting in my office,
90% of security breaches are someone taking a tape or a computer," Grandi says. "So putting them in a server, where you have multiple biometric scans and security parameters just to get to the cage, and then you have advanced intrusion protection, is much safer."
Mid-tier hedge funds of four to eight million under management have been coming to him in droves.
Abacus grew 100 percent last year and boasts 130 clients. Larger funds have yet to solicit the company's services, even though he thinks their attitude toward the cloud has evolved as well. It's more a matter of them having such robust IT teams that they don't need any help.
The one thing he could see them calling Abacus for is management of storage. A big firm like Citadel runs hundreds of terabytes of new data—a basic and mundane task that could be outsourced to a thirdparty provider. In fact, he could even see large funds moving terabytes of historical data—data it must hold onto for regulatory purposes but rarely, if ever, uses—to a public cloud. It would certainly drive down cost.
Grandi expects Abacus to expand its purview out of strictly private and into the hybrid cloud space
sometime in the next year. When it comes to public cloud, however, security is still the first question on everyone's lips. Disaster recovery is the second.
Hybrid means cell-spy.com different things to different people. "When hedge funds think hybrid, they're thinking, we still want to be private with Abacus but we want to keep our servers in-house," Grandi says. "So hybrid to them is on-site private cloud. The next level of hybrid is private-public cloud."
