Windsor Brokers Scales its Real-Time Trading Platform and Improves User Experience Using AWS

Founded in 1988 and licensed by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC), Windsor Brokers wanted to make sure its customers could trade in near real-time on its platform. Traffic spikes are unpredictable in the sector and can affect a trader’s ability to place an order. Spikes generally occur during times of high volatility, which are often caused by breaking news that could affect the value of a company or currency, or during new developments in global politics.

It’s vital that the trading platform is always available and responsive. “Our customers need to be able to manage their accounts and trade efficiently when they want—from anywhere they want—with their platform of choice,” says Leonidas Petsas, IT operations manager at Windsor Brokers. “That is our core competency and a competitive advantage.”

Windsor Brokers’ infrastructure was spread across several cloud providers, colocation sites, and an on-premises data center. In 2020, it decided to consolidate its infrastructure and migrate to AWS. The company wanted to simplify its framework and remain competitive.

Windsor Brokers worked with Cloud Nomads to migrate its business applications and more than 170 servers to AWS. The company chose to use the AWS MAP—a cloud migration program that AWS developed using its experience of migrating thousands of enterprise customers to the cloud. “Between the MAP program and our technical partner we got the automation tools, documentation, training, and financial incentives that made it easy to build a successful business case to migrate to AWS,” says Petsas.

The project took about 8 months. Petsas says that usually these kinds of projects are very time consuming and come with high risk. “The migration went smoothly as planned. Using AWS, we've hit our targets,” he says.

Using AWS, Windsor Brokers’ infrastructure now scales with demand. The company uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to provide secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. It also uses AWS Elastic Beanstalk to deploy and scale web applications, and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to distribute network traffic to improve application scalability.

Windsor Brokers was determined to provide the best possible user experience for its trading customers. To achieve that, the company needed to minimize latency and maximize the performance of its platform. Its customers needed to access information and execute transactions in near-real time and regardless of their geographical location. “In finance, platform availability is critical and every millisecond counts,” says Pestas. “That’s why we now use a cloud provider like AWS—it means our customers can depend on the reliability of our products and services and help keep us competitive in this dynamic market.”

The company uses AWS Regions and Availability Zones, which are data center clusters spread globally. “Regions and Availability Zones strengthen our system’s availability and save us time,” says Petsas. “We can enter new markets quickly and get the performance we need.”

In addition to providing an improved customer experience through better performance, migrating to AWS has helped the Windsor Brokers IT team to be more productive. Today, the company’s IT and development teams no longer spend time managing multiple infrastructures and instead focus on product development. Part of the project also included organizing comprehensive training packages for the company’s DevOps teams, cloud architects, IT security professionals, project managers, and quality assurance testers.

The migration went as planned and the project achieved its goals. The company is now looking at how it can make better use of its data.As a next step, Windsor Brokers plans to migrate its data warehouse and use analytics to generate business insights. “The future looks bright,” says Petsas. “It’s great to have worked with AWS and a local technical partner. They have shown us commitment and they feel like part of our team for the long term.”