Deutsche Börse Group manages complex data volumes with Azure cloud-native platform

As an innovative market infrastructure provider, Deutsche Börse Group deals with a large amount of reference data. To reduce complexity and redundancies in hosting this data, the company was looking for a partner that could help to manage this requirement. Deutsche Börse Group turned to Azure due to the Azure platform’s state-of-the-art data services, focus on security and regulatory compliance, seamless collaboration and guidance from Microsoft teams and Microsoft’s holistic enterprise scale ecosystem for all data management. Since the introduction of the Azure cloud-native data platform, Deutsche Börse Group experiences a faster time to market, with a minimal delay, SLA-backed storing and processing of large data assets as well as higher business continuity and reliance through their Azure-based infrastructure.

Digitization is heavily transforming the financial services industry. The challenge is to not only react to the trend but to actively shape the future of our industry. This is particularly true for organisations like Deutsche Börse Group, which are operating in a strictly regulated environment. By using proven, high-performance technologies, the international exchange organisation strives to offer faster, advanced and secure trading platforms and to give trendsetting impulses in the financial services industry.

A simple solution for complex data volumes

As an innovative market infrastructure provider, Deutsche Börse Group deals with a large amount of reference data. To reduce complexity and redundancies in hosting this data, the company was looking for a partner that could help to manage this requirement. Meeting all necessary compliance and regulatory requirements was of particular relevance.

Deutsche Börse Group turned to Azure due to the Azure platform’s state-of-the-art data services, focus on security and regulatory compliance, seamless collaboration and guidance from Microsoft teams and Microsoft’s holistic enterprise scale ecosystem for all data management.

A centralised reference data platform in the cloud

Centralising its reference data and bringing it to the Azure cloud-native data platform enables Deutsche Börse Group to offer new insights to internal business users such as Post-Trading and Clearing. According to the Head of Department Corporate IT, Lars Bolanca, this change becomes crucial for the company.

“By using the Azure cloud platform, we see a key advantage in terms of scalability and speed, but also in terms of simplifying content and data models,” he said.

With one central data platform called the Reference Data Hub, Deutsche Börse Group can now consolidate and analyse data more efficiently, standardise practices and gain new insights. This is achieved by utilising several Azure products, including Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Data Factory, Azure API Management, Azure Functions, Azure Monitor, Azure Databricks, and Azure SQL. By leveraging multiple products with next-generation capabilities, the company also benefits from synergistic results.

Deutsche Börse Group integrated the concept of ownership and data quality into the Reference Data Hub. Utilising Azure Purview helps to meet governance and overall data quality requirements.

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The partnership with Microsoft significantly supports the company on its journey of moving business processes to the cloud. “This is a huge use case for the partnership of Deutsche Börse Group and Microsoft on a strong IaaS / PaaS offering of Microsoft at enterprise scale,” Lars Bolanca said.

“By using the Azure cloud platform, we see a key advantage in terms of scalability and speed, but also in terms of simplifying content and data models.”

Lars Bolanca, Head of Department Corporate IT, Deutsche Börse AG

Faster and more secure performance

Since the introduction of the Azure cloud-native data platform, Deutsche Börse Group experiences a faster time to market, with a minimal delay, SLA-backed storing and processing of large data assets as well as higher business continuity and reliance through their Azure-based infrastructure. At the same time, the cloud-based data platform has achieved all necessary approvals.

According to Deutsche Börse Group’s Chief Cloud Officer Michael Girg, this transition eased processes across the entire company. “The introduction of the platform has worked flawlessly due to the great support of Microsoft. This has been helpful in shaping architecture, design, and high-level business cases, which also has received a lot of internal support,” said Michael Girg.