Migrating Market Data to a Cloud Environment

Firms across capital markets are rethinking the way they store and access historical market data as the volume required for testing, compliance, and backtesting continues to outpace what on-premises infrastructure can support.

Market data cloud migration offers a clear, viable alternative. Instead of continuing to scale physical infrastructure to match an endlessly growing source of historical data, managing your market data in a cloud environment (public, private, or hybrid) allows you to scale with ease, share data across departments, and access that same data from any location.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• What historical market data is actually used for once it’s in the cloud
• How your firm can move that data in the first place
• The different forms your firm’s cloud architecture can take
• The decisions required for a cloud migration, both internally and with a provider
• How Exegy can support your firm at any stage of that process

What is Historical Market Data Used For?

Historical market data that’s maintained on-premises is typically distributed across separate systems, where your individual teams are limited to whatever portion their own infrastructure can hold. Moving that data to the cloud makes the full historical record accessible to any of your teams, regardless of location, and firms are no longer required to expand physical storage every time that data set grows.

Migrating historical market data to the cloud opens up several practical applications across your firm:

• Application development and testing: Testing new applications against market conditions, instead of a simulated approximation of them
• Regulatory compliance: Reconstructing exactly what the market looked like at a given moment, so your firm can account for its own actions and the market conditions surrounding them
• Archiving and data lake creation: Turning years of historical data into something your firm can search and query
• Tick database and analytics tools: Feeding the tools quants and researchers already rely on 
• Strategy backtesting: Testing trading strategies against as much historical data as needed

Find out more about Exegy’s historical market data solutions.

How to Plan Your Cloud Migration

Before migrating your firm’s data, it’s important to audit what kind of cloud infrastructure you already have in place. Most firms fall into one of three models:

• Private cloud: infrastructure your firm still owns and is responsible for
• Public cloud: scale borrowed from another provider’s infrastructure
• Hybrid: a combination of both, whether built that way deliberately or modified over time

Chances are, you’re operating a mix of the three. According to LSEG’s Global Cloud Survey (July 2025), 82% of financial services firms now run hybrid or multi-cloud environments. This makes it the dominant approach across the industry and informs the next steps you take to initiate your migration.

What Has to Be Resolved Before Migration Begins

A cloud migration requires a series of logistical decisions you need to work through, both internally and with your cloud provider.

Internally, you’ll need to consider:

• How quickly your data volume is growing
• Which teams and regions need access 
• How a cloud environment fits with the workflows you already have in place
• Your internal security and compliance requirements

With your provider, you’ll need to work through:

• What storage will cost over time
• Which data formats are supported
• How market data gets handled without wasting bandwidth
• What room there is to scale further down the line

Where Exegy Fits Into the Migration

Exegy supports your historical data in whatever format you need, including replay via the Exegy Client API (XCAPI), raw PCAP or raw data files, or CSV files for your tick database provider.

We can migrate your data into an existing private or public cloud environment, so your capture device never runs out of storage space, and your teams can create as many instances as they need, anywhere in the world. That includes automating the transfer of captured data to AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or whichever cloud or private infrastructure you already use.

We also help smooth the delivery of market data to the cloud, so you get more out of the bandwidth you already have. Because Exegy is cloud provider-agnostic, we can work with whichever provider you’ve chosen, support collaboration across organizations and their own cloud environments, and meet you wherever you are in your migration plan.

Have questions about your firm’s unique data migration requirements? Request a free consultation with our team.

Spotlight: Exegy Capture Replay

Seamless data migration is where Exegy Capture Replay comes in. Exegy Capture Replay (XCR) captures your live market data and stores it so you can use it again later for testing, analysis, or backtesting a trading strategy. XCR can deliver that data in a couple of ways. If your applications work with raw data, they receive packet capture (PCAP) files with timestamps precise to the nanosecond. If they need the data cleaned up and structured, they can access it through Exegy’s own API instead, which lets you recreate real market conditions and see how your applications actually perform.

Core features and capabilities:

• Regulatory compliance: Nanosecond timestamps support Reg NMS best-execution documentation, and replay rates can be adjusted to run Reg SCI or MiFID II capacity stress tests.
• Strategy backtesting: Test algorithms against real historical market data, audit order entry, and run transaction cost analysis.
• Database loading: Load data losslessly into KDB, OneTick, TickSmith, or your own internal tick database, insulated from unpredictable spikes in market data rates.
• Cloud storage: Collect raw PCAP data for long-term use, with automated transfer to AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or whichever cloud or private infrastructure you prefer.

Beyond capture and replay, XCR also serves as the mechanism that moves your historical data into the cloud in the first place.

Want to know more about how XCR can scale with your firm’s data? Learn more about Exegy Capture Replay.

The volume of historical market data won’t be slowing down anytime soon, even as firms expand their own infrastructure to try to keep up. Moving that data to the cloud solves this common infrastructure dilemma without disrupting the tools and workflows already built around it.

Luckily, you can get ahead of your data migration before it starts to feel overwhelming. Wherever you are in that process, whether you’re just starting to evaluate cloud options, mid-migration, or optimizing a setup you already have, Exegy can help keep you connected to the historical data you depend on.

Request a free consultation to learn more about the options available to you.