The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Inc. (aka FINRA), analyzes up to 75 billion events daily. It analyzes so much data that its data center has nearly reached capacity. To continue to respond to the market and provide the investor protection its known for, FINRA plans to migrate to the cloud.

“We want to have the elasticity that the cloud provides,” FINRA Senior Director Matt Cardillo told Dave Vellante and George Gilbert, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during PentahoWorld 2015. “We needed to change our approach so that we could respond to changes in volume data and market data, as well as changes in user behavior. On a given day we can have spikes in usage when the markets are volatile and we see a lot more users in the system.”

FINRA’s surveillance program analyzes data for potential fraud and other suspicious activity. “We have algorithms that comb through data and look for things that are out of range of what we would consider normal,” said Cardillo. “We have exceptions and alerts that kick out. On top of that we use analytics to help confirm whether there is a problem or if it’s a false positive.”

Staying on top of the Big Data curve

Every day there’s a new project or a new open-source capability when working with Big Data technology. Cardillo said that FINRA’s skilled staff keeps the organization on top of the curve.

“We have people who are innovative and embrace new technology,” he said. “Going into this cloud migration, we knew that some of the tools and technologies that we leverage today may not be the tools that we’ll use on the other side of this. We’re big on open source. Frameworks such as Hadoop, Hive, and Spark help us realize the elasticity that we need.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of PentahoWorld 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE