C Infinity

Ten years ago a new generation of online brokers radically changed how trading was conducted. The markets were opened to a new generation of retail traders who could execute their orders at a fraction of the previous cost and who could enjoy virtual real time access to the latest prices. Globally the numbers of online accounts has soared and the latest estimates are that there are more than 100 million active accounts.
As commission rates have collapsed so has service. Only the largest clients can expect any personal (or more accurately personalised) attention. The vast majority of investors are either herded into funds or are offered an execution only facility. There are logical reasons why this is so.

Zignals is transforming investing by filling the service gap. They are levelling the playing field by offering smaller investors the tools and personalised services; such as comprehensive stock alerts and stock charts, which were previously only available to the largest market participants. Consequently they enable unprecedented personalised attention through powerful dynamic alerts and the best decision support tools on the web. The Zignals goal is to enable the research and investment strategies which deliver real financial performance for investors.

What was the business need?

To achieve these business objectives, Zignals had a number of IT requirements, among them:

• Infrastructure including secure, reliable and highly available connection to the internet, power sources other diversely routed telco connectivity
• Scalable server capacity to meet the needs of initial site and substantial planned future growth
• Scalable bandwidth
• State-of-the-art ancillary services such as audio, video and wireless web features
• Support for Microsoft platform environments (Windows Server 2003) for .NET software applications using SQL Server
• Highly available and stable server environments provided through 24×7x 365-day server management
• Minimal downtime or disruption of the site in the event of needed server upgrades
• A professionally staffed and tooled technical support function covering both application and infrastructure monitoring and help desk
• Non-production staging environment
• Disaster recovery capability
• An efficient, transparent and scalable commercial model

Zignals had a great appreciation for their business and their customers’ needs. However, deploying an online infrastructure is a specialised and niche set of skills. As financial and software development professionals, Zignals appreciated the need to outsource these skills requirements to a company that could offer this expertise.

By choosing the best outsourced managed server hosting company, this could allow Zignals to bring in infrastructural expertise while they continued to develop their business without losing their focus.

It is at that point that Zignals decided to choose C Infinity.

C Infinity Solution Provided

C Infinity consulted with Zignals to evaluate the technology and business requirements to propose the best possible solution for now and for future growth and flexibility. As a provider of financial information, Zignals needed a secure solution. It also must feature the ability to grow and to be proactively managed.

The design features fault tolerance throughout the entire network, hardware and software implementation. No single fault should be able to halt the application and the service being provided by Zignals to their customers.

Providing an online service where information time sensitivity is critical requires a highly performing application. The foundation of this is the Internet connectivity and the server infrastructure. Zignals is using the best servers available and is connected to the Internet using a large capacity Internet connection.

C Infinity believes in providing a bespoke defence-in-depth security implementation to all of their clients. Zignals network features security from the firewall and down into the server at every layer possible.

Building an infrastructure that should be secure, reliable and have good performance requires that you pro-actively manage it.

Aidan Finn of C Infinity says:

‘C Infinity uses Microsoft’s System Center to provide unparalleled management where expertise and automation are built into the network. This solution manages hardware, operating systems and server applications. No fault goes unnoticed. Both C Infinity and Zignals are aware of performance and faults as they happen … and sometimes even before they happen!’

One of the most important things that IT does in a business is backup business data. Zignals operates in the financial world so there are certain responsibilities that they have in this regard. C Infinity provides a secure and reliable backup service using Iron Mountain’s LiveVault. Approved by many regulators, LiveVault securely encrypts data at source and stores it in triplicate for fault tolerance. Using this service, Zignals and their customers can be sure that data is backed up and secure.

None of this matters without using a quality data centre for physically hosting the infrastructure and the application. C Infinity uses the second best data centre in all of Europe, DataElectronics (DEG) in west Dublin. DEG is an award winning facility that can honestly boast that they have not had an outage since 2001. They provide truly fault tolerant power and network connectivity, something which C Infinity continues into each client implementation. Physical security is the foundation of all security and this is something taken very seriously by DEG and C Infinity.

Zignals understands that once an infrastructure is deployed that it must be managed in an ongoing basis so that their customers get the very best experience. C Infinity works with Zignals in on ongoing basis to ensure that they get the best possible implementation and client service. C Infinity believes they as a company, they can only be successful if their clients are successful. This requires viewing their clients as partners and working cooperatively with them.

Scott Tattersall from Zignals commented:

‘We go to great lengths to ensure that our customers get the very best service possible in terms of security, availability, performance and management. By working with C Infinity, Zignals implemented and continues to develop a solution that will securely and reliably guide our customer’s financial decision making for years to come.’

‘We are more than happy with our choice of teaming up with C Infinity and feel confident that they have allowed us deliver our promise to our clients’

For  more information about Zignals please visit their website: www.zignals.com