ICE is a Fortune 500 company and provider of marketplace infrastructure, data services and technology solutions to financial institutions, corporations and government entities. It operates regulated marketplaces, including the New York Stock Exchange, for listing, trading and clearing derivatives contracts and financial securities across major asset classes. ICE Data Services supports the trading, investment, risk management and connectivity needs of customers worldwide. The ICE Global Network (IGN) connects the global market community to a broad range of financial and commodity data sources.

The ICE Global Network (IGN) gives market participants secure, efficient access to proprietary and third-party content, including unicast access to other exchanges and trading venues. Before the launch of IGN Cloud Connect, ICE observed that not all of its customers required direct access to the IGN via a physical point of presence; some wanted greater flexibility in how they reached ICE's business-critical content and services, while still requiring the same robust security, dedicated connectivity and low latency.

With public cloud services becoming a fundamental part of customers' IT architecture, ICE set out to build a data-delivery offering that used public cloud environments. Unicast financial data of this kind had not previously been accessible within the public cloud.

Any cloud-based option had to parallel ICE's on-premises solutions: secure, low-latency access to ICE Data Services offerings, delivered directly from the public clouds as well as from specific IGN access points, and matching the security and privacy customers experienced when connected locally to IGN. Customers also had to be able to adopt and integrate the new service relatively quickly and easily.

To meet these requirements ICE developed and launched IGN Cloud Connect, which gives customers access to ICE's Consolidated Feed, fixed income pricing and analytics, and other data via the cloud. The offering incorporates Megaport's Virtual Cross Connect (VXC) and Megaport Cloud Router (MCR) at key ICE locations, built on the Megaport Software Defined Network (Megaport SDN).

Because the service runs over the Megaport SDN, a customer can connect to IGN from any of 700+ Megaport-enabled data centers in 24 countries across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific, without colocating at an IGN location. It is cloud-provider neutral, so ICE Data Services content can be consumed from AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. The Megaport SDN is a private network that bypasses the public internet, which lets ICE match the security, resiliency and performance customers expect from a local IGN connection.

Connectivity is priced as a fixed monthly fee for bandwidth, and because IGN Cloud Connect is pre-connected between IGN and the cloud providers, a customer can be provisioned in a matter of days rather than the lead time usually associated with third-party vendors. Diverse connections in multiple markets provide redundancy, and customers gain access to both market data dissemination and bidirectional order flow.

The case study also cites three customer deployments: a global market data and analytics provider that built a fully resilient AWS deployment on ICE Consolidated Feed; a retail broker dealer that linked the NJ-NY triangle, a Chicago data center and AWS US-EAST-1 to consume US equity and options data directly in AWS; and a trade surveillance platform that moved from on-premises to AWS while keeping access to Latin American and European exchange data.

• IGN Cloud Connect launched on the Megaport SDN, extending ICE data access to the public cloud
• Customers can connect from 700+ Megaport-enabled data centers in 24 countries without colocating at an IGN site
• Cloud-provider neutral access to ICE Data Services content from AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud
• Connectivity provisioned in a matter of days, with fixed monthly bandwidth fees
• Security and privacy matched to a local IGN connection over a private network that bypasses the public internet
• Adopted globally by asset managers, banks, retail and prop trading firms, surveillance firms and wealth managers