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In today’s fast-paced financial landscape, data is the driving force behind everything from investment strategies to regulatory compliance. This is particularly true in electronic trading, where the capability to efficiently store, process, and analyze historical market data can determine success or failure. Market participants are experiencing a staggering increase in tick data volumes, with annual growth rates ranging from 20-40%, while also needing greater precision. This evolution has placed considerable strain on financial institutions, many of which find their traditional on-premises infrastructure struggling to meet the technical demands and costs associated with managing these expanding datasets.

As financial institutions confront these escalating data challenges, cloud-based solutions provide a transformative path forward. AWS offers an ideal foundation for managing the massive scale and performance needs of financial market data. The virtually unlimited storage capacity, durability, and flexible access patterns of Amazon S3 make it particularly suitable for tick data repositories. The collaboration with AWS Partner LSEG’s Tick History Data and Tick History PCAP (TH Data and TH PCAP) – S3 Direct powered by Amazon S3 – delivers a comprehensive solution for financial market data storage and access. This partnership merges LSEG’s market data expertise with the AWS cloud infrastructure to offer:

• Petabyte-scale financial data storage with enterprise-grade security.
• Optimized cost management through the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class.
• Global, high-performance data access through the AWS worldwide network.
• Seamless integration with analytics tools for deeper market insights.
• Elimination of on-premises infrastructure management overhead.

In this post, we will explore the growing challenges of financial market data management and how cloud solutions can effectively address these needs. We will detail the architecture and workflow of LSEG’s TH Data and TH PCAP solution powered by Amazon S3, while also highlighting the AWS services that underpin this solution. Finally, we will summarize the extensive benefits that make this approach appealing for financial institutions aiming to modernize their market data operations.

How Cloud Solutions Address Financial Data Challenges

Financial institutions commonly face multiple obstacles with their market data infrastructure:

• Managing hundreds of terabytes of monthly data transfers.
• Maintaining costly on-premises infrastructure that requires significant capital investment.
• Unpredictable costs as data volumes increase.
• Complex scaling challenges, especially when managing data from various global exchanges.
• Specialized hardware, connectivity, and skills requirements that divert resources from core business activities.

Cloud-based solutions present transformative methods to tackle these market data challenges. Utilizing cloud storage services like Amazon S3 enables financial institutions to access virtually unlimited storage without the burden of managing physical infrastructure. The pay-as-you-go pricing model provides cost predictability that traditional infrastructure cannot offer. When combined with specialized financial data services, such as LSEG’s TH Data and TH PCAP, these cloud solutions create powerful ecosystems allowing organizations to focus on analysis rather than infrastructure management. The integration of high-quality financial data with scalable cloud storage removes technical barriers such as infrastructure capacity constraints, data transfer bottlenecks, complex scaling needs across global exchanges, specialized hardware dependencies, and the necessity for dedicated skills to maintain on-premises systems—challenges that have historically limited financial institutions from achieving their full analytical potential.

Implementing this solution enables financial institutions to significantly reduce total cost of ownership while attaining enhanced data quality, operational clarity, and the flexibility to scale dynamically as data requirements grow.

The following diagram illustrates the user interface for querying LSEG’s TH Data and TH PCAP data through Amazon Athena. The interface provides a comprehensive view of all Tick History and PCAP data, allowing customers to see all venues, fields, and descriptors. The query functionality enables users to combine, code, and transform TH Data and TH PCAP data alongside their own proprietary data through a unified AWS interface. AWS Glue serves as the data catalog in this solution, maintaining metadata about the tick data stored in Amazon S3 and making it discoverable for Athena queries. While ETL transformation with AWS Glue is optional, it is available for customers who need additional data processing beyond what’s possible with direct queries.

Solution Overview

LSEG’s TH Data and TH PCAP solutions are powered by Amazon S3 and operate through a comprehensive four-step process that manages data from capture to customer access:

1. Data capture: LSEG collects traditional market data directly from exchange data centers using LSEG Elektron Network for TH Data, while TH PCAP data is independently gathered through the LSEG Low Latency Group’s capture suite technology deployed in exchange colocation facilities.
2. Processing and normalization: Data is processed, normalized, and quality-assured.
3. Cloud storage: Processed data is stored in a dedicated LSEG S3 bucket in multiple formats.
4. Customer access: LSEG’s S3 Direct customers can query this data directly or download it on-demand over a congestion-free global network.

The preceding diagram showcases the global network architecture of LSEG’s TH Data and TH PCAP – S3 Direct solution. The LSEG AWS account, which contains LSEG’s TH Data and TH PCAP S3 Bucket and S3 Access Points, connects through the AWS global network, featuring multiple AWS Points of Presence (PoPs) and S3 Transfer acceleration. This robust network infrastructure facilitates efficient data flow to both cloud-based LSEG S3 Direct clients (in AWS Regions A, B, and C) and on-premises data centers.

LSEG’s TH Data and TH PCAP solution utilizes the Amazon S3 object storage architecture in several sophisticated ways:

• Data organization: Financial tick data is stored using a partition-based structure, meaning the data is physically divided into separate segments or “partitions” based on logical categories such as exchange, instrument type, date, and time intervals. This partitioning strategy distributes data across storage in a hierarchical manner, allowing the system to quickly access only the relevant data segments during specific market segments and timeframes, rather than scanning the entire dataset.
• Storage classes optimization: The solution employs automatic S3 Lifecycle policies that transition historical tick data through the Amazon S3 storage classes (Standard → Intelligent-Tiering), optimizing costs while maintaining accessibility based on data age and query patterns. S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves data between access tiers when access patterns change and can archive objects that become infrequently accessed, delivering automatic storage cost savings.
• Parallel request processing: The solution leverages S3’s capability to handle massive concurrent read requests, ensuring efficient processing and retrieval.

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