HCLTech empowers a multi-asset exchange to achieve uninterrupted and resilient market operations
Overview
A leading multi-asset exchange and market infrastructure provider in Asia plays a pivotal role in enabling seamless trading and investment across asset classes. As one of the region’s most critical financial institutions, uninterrupted market operations, regulatory compliance and a resilient IT backbone are essential.
Faced with the growing complexity of hybrid cloud environments, rising transaction volumes and increasing demands for security and availability, the exchange recognized the need to modernize its infrastructure, without compromising stability or reliability.
For over 15 years, the organization has trusted HCLTech as its strategic transformation partner. Together, they have built a resilient IT foundation, accelerated automation and embedded scalability across operations. This enduring partnership has fostered a culture of innovation and reliability, consistently delivering zero-disruption services to market participants.
Challenge
Operating within one of the world’s most dynamic financial ecosystems, the client encountered a range of technology and operational challenges
- High manual effort in infrastructure health checks and diagnostics: Processes were time-consuming and prone to human error.
- Repetitive and delayed incident remediation: Manual interventions slowed recovery times and created dependency on privileged access.
- Inefficient backup monitoring and alert handling: Limited automation impacted compliance and service levels.
- Manual server provisioning and OS deployment: Provisioning lacked standardization, increasing operational overhead.
- Limited visibility into asset and endpoint hygiene: Fragmented tracking of assets and endpoint compliance limited control and security posture.
- Legacy and Obsolete Security Infrastructure - customer relied on a legacy security infrastructure with thousands of outdated firewall rules, creating complexity and operational risk.
At the same time, the client needed to build a scalable cloud-ready architecture that could guarantee high availability, scalability and security. The existing environment was extensive and diverse, including:
- Multiple data centres supporting heterogeneous environment consist of Windows, Linux, Databases and cloud platforms, requiring robust orchestration and monitoring.
- Over 11 petabytes of storage, 300+ databases and 90+ middleware instances forming a highly distributed and data-intensive environment.
- Complex IT ecosystem comprising 1,000+ network devices, substantial number of applications and users, demanding seamless integration, security and scalability.
- Providing seamless managed services across Infrastructure, Applications, Information Security and Projects.
The scale and complexity demanded a trusted transformation partner with deep domain expertise and an automation-first mindset.
Our Solution
HCLTech partnered with the client as a Cloud transformation and operations partner, embedding automation, observability and resiliency into every layer of the IT ecosystem.
- Automated infrastructure health checks and diagnostics
- Implemented orchestration tools, developed Shell/PowerShell/Python scripts.
- Delivered savings of 600+ hours annually and reduced scope for human error.
- Leveraged cloud native tools like SSM, CloudWatch and integrate with monitoring tools
- Accelerated incident remediation
- Deployed automated recovery solutions using scripted triggers.
- Enabled faster recovery without reliance on privileged IDs.
- Smarter backup monitoring and compliance
- Automated backup monitoring and alert suppression with custom orchestration.
- Saved 200+ hours per month while improving SLA compliance.
- Streamlined server provisioning and deployment
- Automated Server provisioning, OS hardening and agent deployments.
- Eliminated manual dependencies and standardized provisioning processes
- End-to-End Asset and endpoint visibility
- Built Server and Endpoint hygiene dashboards integrated with CMDB.
- Delivered 100% visibility into Server & Endpoint hygiene and centralized asset tracking.
- Modernized the legacy security infrastructure
- Rationalizing and cleaning up thousands of outdated rules to reduce complexity and eliminate redundant or risky configurations.
- Migrating to next-generation firewalls with centralized policy management and enhanced threat detection capabilities.
- CVE management and patching compliance
- Daily CVE assessment: Conduct daily reviews of newly published CVEs to evaluate impact and prioritize remediation.
- Patch review governance: Monthly Patch Review Committee (PRC) meetings for compliance tracking, with emergency PRCs for zero-day vulnerabilities.
- End-to-End compliance tracking: Monitor remediation progress across infrastructure, applications and other components to ensure timely and compliant resolution.
- Enabling containerization and modern application platforms
- Deployed Kubernetes and OpenShift platforms to enable secure, scalable cloud-native environments.
- Supported container adoption and onboarding for in-house/Vendor applications
- Integrated CI/CD and governance frameworks to accelerate deployments and ensure compliance.
- Overall lifecycle management of managed CIs and applications
- Upgraded systems to meet End-of-Support (EOS) timelines, with automated OS upgrades via SCCM (Windows) and Ansible (RHEL).
- Performed tech refresh of firewalls and infrastructure tools.
- Managed operations across two primary data centers.
- Collaborated with client to establish Cross-Border Trading
- Partnered with the client to deploy a new data center and office infrastructure.
- Facilitated seamless cross-border trading operations
Beyond automation, HCLTech also introduced:
- Hyper automation and SRE practices to drive operational resilience.
- Full Stack Observability for proactive monitoring and issue resolution.
- A shared culture of innovation and people-first approach for continuous alignment with business outcomes.
Impact
The transformation program helped the client achieve measurable and sustained outcomes:
- Zero disruption: Over 2,350 consecutive market days without disruption.
- Incident reduction: 75% decrease in incidents, with no P1 or P2 since 2016.
- Superior user experience: >90% CSAT consistently achieved, with 100% SLA availability.
- Cost savings through innovation: ~$2.75 million saved by implementing 150+ innovation ideas.
- Long-term resilience: More than 15 years of trusted collaboration, ensuring availability, scalability and confidence in mission-critical operations.
Conclusion:
Through its long-standing partnership with HCLTech, the client has successfully built a future-ready IT foundation that supports market growth, ensures regulatory compliance and delivers uninterrupted services to its ecosystem. By embedding automation, observability and innovation into operations, the organization has not only strengthened its resilience but also reinforced its position as Asia’s leading market infrastructure provider.
