Fund managers face a multitude of pressures today, ranging from regulatory to investor demands for improved transparency and evidence that their data is being stored and secured to the highest standards.
This is a lot for PE groups to take on, who need to focus on the investment process without getting sidetracked having to manage technology risk. As such, demand for outsourced cloud solutions has strong momentum, with Eze Castle Integration very much at the forefront of this.
“We want to be sure that the technology being leveraged supports best-of-breed technology, both in the cloud as well as on-site,” explains Mark Coriaty, Chief Strategy Officer at Eze Castle Integration. “Fund managers want to ensure that their day-to-day workflows are reliable, secure and running off best-of-breed technologies.
“We have all of those components bundled together to provide a turnkey solution, whether that be our Eze Private Cloud or Eze Hybrid Cloud.”
The Eze Private Cloud is a very controlled environment. It contains a lot of components to do with private networking, client controls, data integrity controls, as well as enterprise-standard security measures.
To adapt to the changing market landscape, Eze Castle Integration is able to offer all of its clients a hybrid cloud solution, if they wish, by combining the Eze Private Cloud with public cloud services.
As Coriaty explains, the hybrid cloud takes two things into account: “The standards that we put forth as best practices to our clients within the Eze Private Cloud, as well as all the regulatory requirements that alternative fund managers face. Then we connect key components of Microsoft’s public cloud.
“We have directly connected our private cloud with the Microsoft Cloud so that we can look at and control all the networking, the security components, as well as the end-user experience.”
PE managers like to evaluate everything from the support model, the private cloud model, the hybrid model as well as any ongoing ancillary services that might include business continuity planning and/or cybersecurity.
To that end, the firm takes a very consultative approach.
“We want to analyse and understand the business our clients are running to get a complete understanding. Then, we will put together a current state diagram and roadmap out how we would get to a future state, which would have best practices built in from a technical standpoint.
When a PE group takes the decision to outsource and commence using cloud services, it is critical that the end user experience is as seamless as possible and comparable to their in-house work environment.
They want to know that the right controls are in place.
“The secret behind that is to carefully track and protect all of their data. Security measures are built into our clients’ workflows that we can monitor and manage. Cybersecurity is a top issue both at a firm level as well as at the end point.
“Three or four years ago, we probably did 30 investor DDQs annually. Now we do exponentially more per week. It is a huge advantage when someone is outsourcing to a firm like Eze Castle Integration because not only do we check the boxes across the board, at the same time the actual service LPs receive it likely better than if managers were still keeping everything in-house,” comments Coriaty.
On winning this year’s award, Coriaty says: “We are thrilled to have won the award. We’ve spent considerable time and effort putting together solutions for buy-side firms. The fact that we’ve won this award demonstrates that those solutions are viable.”
