Financial data delivery gets easier with cloud-native Crux Informatics

A vast majority of financial institutions are exploring cloud computing to see how they might serve investment processes and customers better, faster and more securely, and be able to plan for the future with modern infrastructure. Crux Informatics, a data delivery and operations company, built its infrastructure from the ground up with cloud computing, and hasn’t looked back. At Google Cloud Platform (GCP), we’re pleased to partner with Crux Informatics to help scale the building of secure, efficient and high-quality data pipelines for the financial services industry.

Since its inception, Crux has used its cloud platform and expert services to connect data users and suppliers in the capital markets so data can flow. Data suppliers are large data owners and distributors that gather and send raw financial data to banks and hedge funds—the data users—for them to make trading and other critical business decisions. These data suppliers provide a wide variety of data sets in multiple formats to users. Until recently, financial firms ingested and processed data in-house. As a result, their data analysts spent a significant amount of time and resources focusing on the repetitive tasks of extracting, cleaning and validating the data to prepare it for analysis.

Crux eliminates the need for financial firms to build and maintain these complex data management infrastructures in-house by providing a solution that replaces the data supply chain ingestion process. Its cloud-based delivery and operations platform serves as an industry utility, so customers can reliably process the data they need, when they need it and where they need it. In turn, data users can access more data from their suppliers and build their own proprietary services, moving away from repetitive tasks to sophisticated data analysis that brings knowledge and insight to capital markets.

Cloud benefits spread to the financial services industry
Financial institutions have uncompromising technology requirements regarding security, compliance and accuracy. With persistent and rapid change within financial services, it’s essential that technology keeps up the same pace. But maintaining massive repositories of data in-house makes it harder for financial firms to move quickly. Migrating legacy systems into a streamlined data supply chain on the cloud can also be very challenging. For Crux’s customers, their product brings a simpler way to ease into cloud use, rather than having to choose separate services.

Crux uses a variety of GCP’s set of tools and services to help build its business faster and serve its customers better. The cloud-native approach that Crux has taken means that it can offer high resiliency by using multi-region storage buckets in Cloud Storage combined with GCP’s global network and ability to spin up high-availability clusters. Crux is able to detect and respond quickly to issues thanks to its comprehensive monitoring, logging, and tracing infrastructure that uses Stackdriver.

High-performance data access and data processing are foundational aspects of the Crux offering, which is facilitated by Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), BigQuery for data analytics and Istio for production monitoring. Security is also paramount for Crux, and GCP’s Shared VPC option gives the company a global IP space where firewall rules for multiple projects can be centrally managed by the infrastructure team.

These GCP services have helped Crux grow and scale up quickly, and has led to many benefits for Crux’s customers. Crux plans more growth and development to serve even more clean, useful data to its customers.

Learn more about Crux and about GCP for financial services.