33% lower TCO
Settlement times improved up to 50% for greater efficiency
Thousands of CPU cores and 60+ apps migrated
85% reduction in disaster recovery time for critical SAP S/4HANA systems
50% less latency for DAX® index engine: 13k+ indices, 30M ticks
Deutsche Börse Group re-engineered critical systems on Google Cloud to boost release speed, operational agility, and resilience.
Deutsche Börse Group re-engineered critical systems on Google Cloud to boost release speed, operational agility, and resilience.
Why Deutsche Börse Group modernized mission-critical systems with Google Cloud
Deutsche Börse Group is one of the world’s leading exchange organizations, providing the trading, clearing, and post-trade infrastructure that underpins global capital markets. Through Clearstream, its post-trade and custody business, the company acts as a central securities depository (CSD) that processes over one million transactions each day and safeguards trillions of euros in assets. Running systems at this scale across more than 60 markets requires exceptional reliability and low latency—and, of course, strict regulatory compliance.
For years, much of this critical infrastructure ran in traditional on-premises environments. These systems were stable and battle-tested, but scaling them required significant time and investment. Provisioning new environments could take weeks or even months. Release cycles were constrained by hardware availability and complex operational dependencies.
At the same time, the capital markets landscape was shifting. Clients expected faster innovation. Regulatory requirements continued to evolve. Competitive pressure increased. To maintain its leadership position, Deutsche Börse Group needed more than just modernized applications. The underlying infrastructure powering its core financial systems had to evolve as well.
For our core financial systems, we needed a platform that could match the performance of our existing environment while giving us the flexibility to innovate faster. Google Cloud provided that balance.
Daniel Besse
Chief Digital Transformation Officer at Deutsche Börse Group
To move forward, Deutsche Börse Group defined a clear objective: bring its most critical workloads to the cloud increasing agility, scalability, and resilience. “We are always innovating. Moving core systems to Google Cloud was just the next step in evolving our infrastructure to become more scalable and faster in delivering new capabilities,” says Julia Blankenberg, Head of Cloud and Architecture Office at Deutsche Börse Group subsidiary Clearstream. By leveraging a workload-optimized architecture, Deutsche Börse Group now combines regulatory-grade security with the elasticity needed to handle sudden spikes in global trading volumes.
Deutsche Börse Group evaluated a number of cloud options before deciding on Google Cloud. “For our core financial systems, we needed a platform that could match the performance of our existing environment while giving us the flexibility to innovate faster. Google Cloud provided that balance,” says Daniel Besse, Chief Digital Transformation Officer at Deutsche Börse Group.
Accelerating core systems on Google Cloud
Deutsche Börse Group is now moving Clearstream’s mission-critical systems to Google Cloud to consolidate data centers, further develop resilience, and overcome the scaling limits of legacy infrastructure. To achieve this, Deutsche Börse Group has modernized dozens of core financial applications onto Google Compute Engine, supporting latency-sensitive databases and post-trade processing at scale.
The environment runs on a combination of N series machines and the latest generation of C series machines. providing elastic capacity designed for peak market volatility. To support post-trade and settlement workloads, the team implemented a highly resilient architecture on Compute Engine. Latency-sensitive databases run on high-performance C4D machines optimized for compute-intensive transaction processing, while C4/N4 instances support broader application services. Hyperdisk Balanced and Hyperdisk Extreme underpin core database workloads, delivering the consistent performance required to process millions of financial transactions daily.
Infrastructure is no longer the limiting factor for delivering change.
Julia Blankenberg
Head of Cloud and Architecture Office at Clearstream, a subsidiary of Deutsche Börse Group
“Our core systems handle enormous transaction volumes every day,” said Blankenberg. “We needed compute and storage performance that could match—and even exceed, in some cases—our on-premises environment.”
Moving from a hardware-bound environment to Google Cloud unlocked significant gains in agility and performance. Settlement turnaround progressed at an exceptional pace, comfortably surpassing the 50% range.
Provisioning times dropped from months to hours. Deutsche Börse Group also runs OpenShift clusters on Compute Engine using Intel-based CPUs, which maintains portability while standardizing on Google Cloud.
The move also delivered:
- Scalable infrastructure for peak transaction periods
- Faster validation and testing of core financial applications
- High availability aligned with regulatory requirements
With Google Cloud, Deutsche Börse Group transformed its core infrastructure into an on-demand platform built to support continuous innovation in global capital markets.
The future of capital markets is in the cloud
For Deutsche Börse Group, migrating core systems to Google Cloud marked the beginning of a long-term transformation.
Deutsche Börse Group also transitioned tools for customer relationship management, human resources, and finance to Google Cloud by moving its mission-critical SAP S/4HANA environment from a rigid on-premises infrastructure to a secure cloud foundation. The migration reduced disaster recovery times (RTO) from hours to minutes and shortened development cycles for new financial services from months to days. Combined with technologies like Cortex, BigQuery, and AI, the move has accelerated innovation while reducing costs.
A major milestone was also the migration of the DAX® stock index calculation to Google Cloud. Deutsche Börse Group now calculates more than 13,000 indices and nearly 30 million ticks daily in the cloud, including the entire DAX family and EUROSTOXX50. The modernization reduced aggregation latency by more than half and streamlined complex index calculations, significantly improving time to market for index reports.
With more than 75% of workloads running in the cloud, Deutsche Börse Group is now pursuing a dual strategy: migrating traditional enterprise systems to Google Compute Engine while building new microservices-based applications on Compute Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine to improve scalability and speed delivery across business lines.
By standardizing on Google Cloud infrastructure, Deutsche Börse Group has created a consistent platform for engineering teams. Shared tooling and scalable environments support collaboration while maintaining compliance controls such as customer-managed encryption keys, zone separation, and regional failover safeguards.
In our industry, standing still is not an option. We have to evolve continuously. With Google Cloud, we’re building an infrastructure that allows us to adapt faster and support our digital transformation without compromising resilience.
Daniel Besse
Chief Digital Transformation Officer at Deutsche Börse Group
“In our industry, standing still is not an option,” said Besse. “We have to evolve continuously. With Google Cloud, we’re building an infrastructure that allows us to adapt faster and support innovation without compromising resilience.”
That flexibility positions Deutsche Börse Group to respond quickly to new market dynamics while maintaining the availability and compliance expected of global financial infrastructure providers.
As one of the world’s leading market infrastructure providers, Deutsche Börse Group delivers secure, high-performance access to global capital markets for investors, financial institutions, and companies.
Industry: Financial Services
Location: Frankfurt, Germany
Products: Compute Engine, Hyperdisk Balanced, Hyperdisk Extreme, OpenShift on Compute Engine
