Asia’s capital markets are entering a period of exceptional activity. In Singapore, SGX Group reported that securities turnover rose 35 percent year on year in FY2026 to S$455.7 billion, while securities daily average value reached its highest level in 18 years.
Those figures tell a story of market growth, but they also signal an infrastructure challenge that is less visible. Every trade depends on market data moving between exchanges, data centers, cloud platforms, brokers and liquidity venues. As volumes rise and strategies become more automated, the network supporting that flow of information must handle more data with little tolerance for delay or interruption.
That pressure is especially evident in quantitative trading. Firms are ingesting larger datasets, operating across more Asian venues and using increasingly sophisticated analytics and automated models. Capacity requirements are rising accordingly.
Capacity is only half the equation
It would be easy to conclude that the answer is simply to build a bigger, faster network. Capacity matters, but it is only half the equation. A high-capacity connection can still become a single point of failure.
This distinction is increasingly important as businesses contend with cyber threats, accidental cable damage, equipment failures, extreme weather and wider geopolitical uncertainty. In February, Singapore’s Cyber Security Agency said all four major telecommunications operators had been targeted by a sophisticated UNC3886 cyberespionage campaign during 2025. The agency said the coordinated response contained the incident and that services were not disrupted, but the episode illustrated the potential knock-on effects of telecommunications incidents on essential services.
For a trading firm, an interruption does not need to last hours to be consequential. It may mean delayed market data, orders arriving too late, missed opportunities or risk controls operating with an incomplete picture. During volatile periods, the consequences can be greater because both trading activity and the need for timely information rise at precisely the moment infrastructure is under the most pressure.
Redundancy is not necessarily resilience
Many firms respond by buying a second connection, which is sensible, but two connections do not automatically create resilience. They may ultimately depend on the same carrier, cable, landing station, exchange access point, building entry or physical route. If that shared component fails, the primary and backup services can be affected together.
The same problem applies to capacity. A genuinely separate route may still be inadequate if it was designed only for limited emergency traffic. When the primary path fails, the alternative must be capable of carrying the production workload, including peak market-data and trading volumes, without creating a new bottleneck.
Resilience should therefore be assessed as an end-to-end business capability, not as a count of circuits on an infrastructure diagram. Firms need visibility into where routes physically run, which dependencies they share, how traffic will switch between them and what performance the secondary path can sustain. Diversity should extend across carriers and physical paths where appropriate, rather than existing only at the contractual level.
Test for the disruption that matters
Resilience plans also need to be tested against realistic conditions. A backup that works during a quiet maintenance window may behave very differently when markets are volatile and traffic is at its highest. Testing should model the loss of a primary route during peak demand, measure how quickly traffic is redirected and confirm whether latency, capacity and security controls remain within acceptable limits.
The exercise should bring technology, operations, risk and business teams together. Network design decisions affect trade execution and customer outcomes, so they cannot sit solely within an engineering function. Firms should define which workflows must continue, how much capacity they require and what degradation, if any, the business can tolerate.
This does not mean duplicating every element at any cost. The appropriate design will depend on the firm’s markets, strategies and risk profile. The goal is to make dependencies visible and align investment with the operational and financial impact of disruption.
Infrastructure confidence is a market advantage
Singapore’s position as a gateway to Asian markets rests partly on confidence that global firms can connect to regional venues securely, consistently and at scale. As trading, AI-driven analytics and market-data volumes grow, that confidence will increasingly depend on the resilience of the infrastructure beneath them.
The next stage of Asia’s trading growth will require more than speed. Firms will need sufficient capacity for increasingly data-intensive activity, genuine route diversity when disruption occurs and the ability to scale without adding unnecessary complexity. A second connection may satisfy a policy requirement; only a tested, independent and appropriately sized alternative can help keep the business running.
Jerian Kwek is Head of Regional Growth, Singapore at Colt Technology Services, where she leads enterprise and capital-markets growth across APAC. She has more than 20 years of experience serving enterprise customers across regional markets.
Editor’s note: This contributed article has been lightly edited for clarity, length, and style. Where appropriate, TNGlobal may verify, qualify or omit factual claims that cannot be independently corroborated. The views and arguments expressed remain those of the author.
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