Nasdaq Ramps Up Cloud Move

Nasdaq plans to migrate its markets to the public cloud over the next decade, a move that was planned before this year but validated in part because of the coronavirus pandemic. Several of Nasdaq’s 28 markets in North America and Europe will be hosted in the public cloud in about five years, with all of its markets expected to migrate over the next decade, said Brad Peterson, the company’s chief technology and information officer. The markets are currently run on-premise in data centers. Scalability was a major advantage for Nasdaq when the pandemic hit earlier this year and messaging traffic surged amid increased demand for orders, quotes, trades and other market data, Mr. Peterson said. In March, Nasdaq repeatedly saw daily peaks of more than 100 billion messages being sent and received in the U.S., more than twice the volume of the previous record. Since Nasdaq’s data warehouse for the U.S. and Canada had already migrated to Amazon Web Services from its own data centers, the cloud was able to handle the increase in traffic