Hedge Funds Prep for Data & Cyber Challenges

with John Manganiello featured in FundFire

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Hedge funds will remember 2020 as a year of immense disruptions ranging from market gyrations to moving operations. As firms navigate the future of work and offices, plenty of data, technology and cybersecurity challenges lie ahead, industry
watchers say.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for hedge funds to have effective digital and data infrastructure in place, especially as some of the largest hedge funds plan to keep the majority of their workforces remote into 2021.

Many hedge fund managers are still using legacy technology systems or a patchwork of different systems combined, says John Manganiello, head of business development at RFA, a technology service provider. Many are also still dealing with receiving data in different and unstructured formats, he adds.

“I think [hedge funds] have been doing things in a repetitive manner and they’ve known there’s a better way to accomplish it,” he says. “[The pandemic] is accelerating everything.”

Looking at the year ahead, many firms are creating roadmaps focused on three areas: core infrastructure and the cloud, application management, and their data strategy for modeling and insights, Manganiello says.

Firms are looking to have a centralized data strategy and asking: “What does the final footprint look like in 2021 for a manager?” he says.