I was doing some research on the Internet recently, looking for companies that offer Complex Event Processing (CEP) in the cloud and interestingly enough found plenty of posts about why CEP has so much difficulty going to the cloud. 
Why would that be so? Today we find so many technologies and solutions offered in the cloud environment, why not CEP?
Let’s look at what CEP is used for today:
- Algo-trading
- Fraud-detection
- Pattern detection
- Situational Awareness
The common themes that rule all of the above use cases are latency, security, privacy and complexity.
Algo-trading, where latency is a primary factor, makes it impossible to deploy CEP in the cloud environment, however this can change in the future with faster hardware and cloud technologies, but co-location on the exchange will always be faster, but what about the retail investor? Would they want to get access to a simplified high-tech CEP driven Algo-trading platform, where latency may not be a big issue? Possible, but I guess we are not there yet.
Security and privacy are important considerations, but don’t we already share so much information about ourselves via email and Facebook and Twitter? Cloud environments already can offer a high degree of security and data protection. What about complexity and “instant-gratification” that we are very much accustomed to? That is where I believe CEP implementations need a lot of work — simplicity.
For CEP to be consumable in the cloud, it has to be relatively simple, fast, secure and offer out-of-the-box solutions (pattern detections) for common problems in certain areas, be it Algo-trading, fraud-detection or anything else.