London Stock Exchange Group Puts Cloud Knowledge into Action Using AWS Migration Solutions

London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), a global financial markets infrastructure and data provider, is in the midst of a complex, multiyear cloud migration. When the ForexClear team, which is a part of LSEG’s Post Trade division, faced the need to migrate infrastructure critical to the United Kingdom’s financial system, the company looked to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for support.

Because using AWS was new to the ForexClear team, it needed to rapidly develop AWS migration skills and pilots to get started with the complex migration efforts. Using AWS Experience-Based Acceleration (AWS EBA), a hands-on and agile approach to realize specific cloud objectives, ForexClear received targeted AWS training, specialist assistance, coaching, and facilitation in agile methods that helped the team take its first steps and strategically plan for the future while upskilling employees to increase retention.

Based in the United Kingdom, LSEG delivers data, analytics, indexes, market surveillance, and solutions to help organizations manage risk, workflow, and data. ForexClear offers a solution for performing risk assessments before clearing products for foreign exchange.

In 2017, LSEG began migrating workloads to AWS for part of its business with the goal of modernizing its infrastructure to increase efficiency. As a growing company that is integrally connected to the global financial system, LSEG also sought cloud services to increase scalability and resiliency. Because of the size of the business, with over 25,000 employees spanning 70 countries, LSEG knew that this migration project would take time. ForexClear’s solution alone requires hundreds of virtual servers, which are time-consuming for staff to manage, and there are seven other solutions within the Post Trade division. “We have to be extremely resilient in everything we do because if we stop processing trades, the financial markets stop,” says David Gavini, director of software engineering for ForexClear at LSEG.

As ForexClear prepared to migrate business-critical infrastructure to the cloud, the team explored using consultants to manage the project because the Post Trade division had limited experience with cloud technology. ForexClear instead chose to use AWS EBA to equip its existing staff with cloud skills rather than outsourcing the work. In November 2022, ForexClear began planning for its first EBA Party, a type of workshop that is aimed at addressing friction points and blockers to an organization’s cloud journey. After 4 weeks of remote preparation, ForexClear held the EBA Party in its offices over 3 days and successfully performed a trial migration of one of its applications in a collaborative effort. “With 4 weeks of planning for the 3-day EBA Party, we quickly achieved exactly what we wanted,” says Gavini. “We understood what we could migrate to the cloud, how much effort it would take, and what challenges we would face.”

During the first EBA Party, the team learned how to use the technology and developed a road map for future migrations. ForexClear then completed two additional EBA Parties. Because of the strong results achieved, the wider Post Trade division completed one EBA Party and has two more planned.

Using AWS, ForexClear saves time for its team by reducing manual workflows and accelerating the cloud migration. “If we had migrated the first application without using AWS EBA, we would have had to stop and start,” says Gavini. “Given the capacity and concept switching, it would have taken 3–4 months.” Because the team prepared for the migration up front and reduced roadblocks, ForexClear completed the migration in 3 days. LSEG also benefits from time savings for the company overall because teams often face similar challenges and can learn from the collaboration and knowledge gained using AWS EBA. “EBA Parties help you overcome a particular challenge,” says Gavini. “If everyone uses AWS EBA, you can spread that knowledge much quicker.”

Because of the scale and complexity of migrating ForexClear’s solution in the highly regulated financial industry, consultancy companies would have needed to deploy a large team to complete the project. By developing expertise internally instead, ForexClear significantly reduced costs, increased employee retention, and accomplished the first three migrations with a technology team of around 50 people.

Employees have a safe and structured environment for learning during the AWS EBA process. They also achieve a tangible outcome by the end of the EBA Party rather than completing theoretical training exercises. “People feel really motivated by upskilling,” says Gavini. “They see that their career is moving toward the latest and greatest technology, which isn’t the case for an on-premises infrastructure.”

ForexClear’s solution must handle high volumes, calculating risk assessments for approximately 20,000 trades per day. Using AWS services, ForexClear can handle that daily volume, scale as the business grows, and develop resiliency. “LSEG has a large impact on the financial market, so it’s important for us to develop a really strong level of resilience and have data across multiple regions and data centers,” says Gavini. “You can’t scale up like that when you’re limited to an on-premises data center.”

So far, ForexClear has successfully performed trial migrations for three of its 25 applications using AWS EBA. The ForexClear team views these projects as a warm-up for the larger migration initiative, which it will fully focus on starting in September 2023.

Other teams at LSEG are planning to use AWS EBA to migrate additional applications to the cloud in pursuit of the company’s migration goals. To further reduce migration timelines and costs, LSEG also plans to use the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP), which accelerates organizations’ cloud migration and modernization journey with an outcome-driven methodology. “Using AWS EBA, we’ve completed a migration, and we’ve given everyone the right level of confidence about what the cloud migration will look like,” says Gavini.