ALEF powers complex financial simulations with Oracle Cloud
Italy-based developer boosts performance, lowers costs, and tightens security running its financial software on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
“We tried other clouds before discovering Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, but for our specific applications and use cases, OCI proved to be the best enterprise-grade solution. The scalability, flexibility, and security were key to our success.”
Business challenges
ALEF (Advanced Laboratory for Economics and Finance), with roots in academia, develops software that helps insurance companies, banks, government agencies, and other customers with some of their biggest financial challenges. Those challenges include managing investment portfolios, mitigating risk, valuing assets, and assessing contracts. ALEF’s software’s complex financial simulations often require massive amounts of data and high-performance computing resources.
Before ALEF adopted several Oracle Cloud solutions, customers ran ALEF’s software on their own on-premises IT infrastructure. They were responsible for managing and securing that infrastructure, as well as for complying with security and other regulations. But many customers didn’t have the resources to keep up.
ALEF decided it needed a higher-performing and more cost-effective, scalable, and secure cloud-based solution.
As a managed service provider, Oracle Cloud Guard helped ALEF anticipate the right security posture for upcoming compliance regulations and implement them quickly using existing tools and APIs. Oracle Cloud Guard is a great tool to anticipate security and compliance concerns before they have even occurred.
Why ALEF Chose Oracle
After testing cloud infrastructure services from Oracle, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft, ALEF chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to handle its data-intensive workloads. OCI checked all of its boxes: superior price-performance, scalability, and security.
Results
ALEF implemented several Oracle Cloud solutions, all running on OCI. First, Oracle High-Performance Computing (HPC) gives ALEF the compute resources of the most robust on-premises solutions with the elasticity and consumption-based pricing of the cloud. When ALEF benchmarked its HPC workloads on competing cloud infrastructure providers, it found that its workloads run 30% faster on OCI.
One HPC application ALEF offers to insurance companies lets them complete complicated Monte Carlo simulations (to predict the probability of different outcomes when random variables intervene) for risk analysis faster and at lower cost. Thanks to the ease of use and availability of HPC resources on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, ALEF can spin up a range of other applications for customers in just a few weeks.
The laboratory calculated a 70% performance improvement for some applications on OCI compared with when they ran on-premises. Using its G-Consol application, some processes that once took more than 30 hours to complete now take just a few hours. ALEF's grid computing applications, including Disar benefit from what OCI offers in terms of modern, state-of-the-art engineered hardware and services.
With ALEF’s managed services model, customers are benefitting from the additional security capabilities of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which are critical given the company’s handling of sensitive financial data. Pietro Lascari, ALEF delivery manager, says he likes OCI’s “security by default” approach, as well as its easy-to-use tools “that help us keep the security posture we need for us and our customers.”
In addition, to help customers avoid breaches and comply with regulations, the laboratory uses Oracle Cloud Guard to identify existing and potential security threats.