About Options
Options is a global leader in financial technology managed services and IT infrastructure products. The Company enables clients to deliver a dual mandate: operating world-class financial technology infrastructure, while supporting business scalability and new technology initiatives.
With seven offices and a global client presence spanning 20 countries, Options has over 260 subject matter experts, and an infrastructure footprint that provides their clients with global operations through a single vendor.
Case Study Snapshot
- A decade ago, Options made a strategic decision to become the first provider to offer cloud services to the financial sector.
- The Company has since partnered with Megaport to provide their clients with connectivity to leading cloud providers through their existing Options Cloud Connect solution.
- In solving the challenges of the Company’s public cloud connectivity strategy, Megaport stood out as the best solutions partner, due to the broad ecosystem of service providers paired with both companies’ client bases requiring them to provide solutions anywhere in the world at an enterprise business pace.
- Connecting to the leading cloud solutions providers through Megaport’s Software Defined Network (SDN) allowed Options to provide their customers with rapid deployment of their cloud strategies.
Challenges
As an established single vendor solution with a global client presence, Options identified a need to provide rapid deployment of cloud connectivity across all regions. Many of the Company’s existing clients were already utilising some form of public cloud for non-production, development-style deployments, and turned to Options for assistance with their connectivity. The Company recognised that in order to support their clients’ growing hybrid cloud strategies, they needed to provide network connectivity to all the hyper-scale public cloud providers.
Some of the challenges faced:
- While already having an expansive network backbone, Options lacked a point of presence (PoP) in every data centre necessary for the provisioning of cloud access to leading public cloud regions and availability zones.
- Building out the physical infrastructure required to support a global footprint for their clients would have been an expensive and time consuming investment and would have introduced more operational complexity.
“From the start of our search for a best-fit partner, Megaport stood out due to the number of possible connection locations and the bandwidth scalability capabilities offered. To date, our partnership with Megaport has provided us with the ability to support our global client base’s emerging hybrid cloud strategies and the Megaport team has been extremely helpful in the design, deployment, and support of the solution. We look forward to expanding our global Cloud Connect offering, enabled by our partnership with Megaport.”
Michael Russo, VP Product – Managed Applications
Solutions and Benefits
In order to support their global, public connectivity strategy, Options sought a partner capable of solving their cloud connectivity challenges, and looked to Megaport.
- Connecting to the cloud via Megaport allowed Options to support their global client base’s hybrid cloud strategies without the large upfront investments associated with the establishment of dedicated data centre presences and the associated infrastructure costs.
- Megaport’s rapid, on-demand provisioning paired with their flexible and scalable bandwidth has enabled Options to provide cloud connectivity to a broad range of clients, from small startups to large, multinational institutions. This pairs extremely well with the Company’s overall ethos that no client’s needs are too small or too large.
- Since partnering with Megaport, Options Cloud Connect has grown from single, low bandwidth AWS connections, to dual or multiple, higher- bandwidth connections to multiple cloud providers delivering both resiliency and redundancy.
- The partnership has seen Options expand their presence in major data centres and availability zones, offering their clients the highest quality service with maximum flexibility.
Key Points
- Options clients commonly utilise multicloud and hybrid cloud strategies incorporating:
- CloudWatch, DynamoDB, EBS, EC2, and Glacier in AWS.
- Virtual machines, storage, and database in Azure.
- The Company has connections to both AWS and Azure, and with Megaport they have the capability to rapidly and reliably connect to leading cloud service providers as their clients’ strategic cloud requirements demand.
- Megaport’s capability of offering Virtual Cross Connects (VXCs) with elastic bandwidth enabled Options the ability to support cloud connectivity needs of their global client base, regardless of size.
- Options enables clients the ability to bridge public and private clouds via the Options global WAN, which extends to their 40+ fintech-specific data centres around the world.
Benefits
- Options Cloud Connect clients grew 425% YTD since deploying their network solution through Megaport.
- The partnership with Megaport has also allowed Options to expand their presence in major data centres and availability zones without expensive upfront investments associated with specific data centre infrastructure.
