Executive Summary
A leading financial self-regulatory organization (SRO) relied on a decade-old, on-premises market-surveillance platform that had become a bottleneck for agility, scale, and cost. Partnering with Pellera since 2007, the SRO executed a two-phase application modernization, rehosting on AWS, then going fully cloud-native, producing a scalable, AWS-native surveillance system, significantly improved price-performance, and the agility to adapt to evolving market and regulatory demands.
The Challenge
To protect investors and maintain fair, orderly markets, the SRO relied on a regulatory surveillance solution that ingested and analyzed enormous volumes of trade and market data to detect insider trading, market manipulation, and other abuses. But its core platform, a proprietary Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application on IBM WebSphere with an on-premises Oracle database, was built more than a decade ago and had become a bottleneck.
Limited agility to adapt to evolving brokerage models, scalability challenges as data volumes surged, and high operating costs from aging on-premises infrastructure all pushed the SRO to partner with Pellera on a strategic modernization that would preserve critical surveillance functionality while enabling agility, cloud-scale performance, and lower costs.
The Approach
Pellera designed a two-phase plan aligned with best practices for application modernization in financial services: rehosting and light refactoring first, then full refactoring and progressive adoption of cloud-native services.
The Solution
The engagement moved from quick wins to a fully cloud-native architecture:
01
Optimize the J2EE Application
Updated the legacy WebSphere-based application to align with cloud deployment models, improving performance, reliability, and maintainability.
02
Lift-and-Improve to AWS
Migrated the application tier to Amazon Web Services for elasticity, fault tolerance, and efficiency, with a secure hybrid link to the on-premises Oracle data layer.
03
Refactor the Data Access Layer
Refactored the application to support new data drivers and integrations optimized for cloud-native services.
04
Replace Oracle with AWS-Native Data
Replaced the legacy Oracle database and on-premises data services with AWS-native services, removing all remaining on-premises dependencies for an “all-in-AWS” strategy.
The Results
The initiative delivered transformative outcomes and clear ROI:
Fully AWS-native & scalable
Removing WebSphere and Oracle gave the SRO a cloud-native surveillance system that absorbs huge swings in trading volume without performance or cost penalties.
Improved price-performance
Elastic scaling plus reduced licensing and maintenance costs made the platform far more sustainable and cost-efficient.
Greater agility
The SRO can now deploy new surveillance patterns, integrate new data sources, and respond to regulatory change faster.
A long-term partnership
Since 2007, Pellera has served as a trusted technology and regulatory-domain partner to the SRO. The result demonstrates the ROI of application modernization in financial services, where speed to adapt directly affects regulatory effectiveness and market confidence.
Conclusion
If you’re ready to explore how application modernization can transform your financial services organization, Pellera can help you design and implement a tailored strategy aligned with your business, regulatory, and technology goals. Schedule a consultation today.
