Why GMP Needed ClearCube

As we hope you’ve noticed, ClearCube announced a new relationship today with GMP Securities, a Canadian investment bank and equities dealer. We’ve been talking a bit lately about IT challenges facing the financial industry — ergonomics, physical and data security, and so on. Here’s how those ideas apply to GMP:

Make sure the solution to one problem doesn’t create another
A financial institution like GMP needs massive computing power on the trading floor, with users running multiple processes and applications simultaneously. How do you meet that need? By assigning multiple PCs per user.

But those multiple PCs each present an opportunity for downtime when they lock or freeze or crash (as PCs have been known to do). And downtime isn’t merely an inconvenience in the financial world — missing a trade by even a few seconds can translate into huge losses.

ClearCube’s PC Blades eliminate multiple physical PCs while also addressing the issue of downtime. Jason Scott, manager of Technology Services for GMP Securities, put it this way: “The IT staff in our central data center can seamlessly move end-users off of an unresponsive or disabled workstation to a working one without the trader losing any time.”

Security and centralization go hand in hand
GMP Securities has offices in Canada and Switzerland, and handles its American clients through a wholly owned subsidiary, Griffiths McBurney Corp. That’s a lot of data living in, and running between, a lot of different places. Finding a way to deal with this massive data burden is part of what led GMP’s Canadian offices to choose ClearCube.

Every business these days is concerned about preserving and protecting their data. But for financial institutions, that straightforward mandate can get complicated fast. They have to protect data from hackers and malicious outsider attacks. They have to protect data from careless employees and internal theft. They have to protect data from earthquakes, tsunamis, power outages, and other disasters. And, like any highly regulated industry, they also have to preserve all that data in order to comply with a combination of local, regional, and federal regulations.

Security- and compliance-related policies and processes can be difficult to implement across multiple desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. It’s a lot easier if all the data lives in one place … say, in a secure, centralized location controlled by authorized IT personnel.

Stay tuned
We’ll have more information on the GMP implementation throughout the week. Sign up for our RSS feed and get the details as they develop.