A Dubai trading desk has three IT problems the rest of the office does not: market data and voice that must not drop during a session, communications that may have to be produced later, and payment instructions that are the single most attacked thing in the business. Listonics builds around those. Projects run from AED 2,500 to AED 30,000 depending on requirement.
A dropped session is not an inconvenience
In most offices a brief network interruption is annoying. On a trading desk it can mean a missed window, a position left unhedged, or a counterparty call that does not connect while a price moves. That difference should drive the whole design, and it usually does not, because the desk was fitted out like the rest of the floor.
What the desk actually needs is redundancy at every layer that can be doubled: two internet lines from different providers with automatic failover, cabled connections to every trading position rather than wireless, uninterruptible power on the desk equipment, and monitoring that alerts before a link degrades rather than after it fails. Our office network setup page covers the build, and network security covers how the segments are arranged.
- Two internet lines, different providers, automatic failover on the firewall.
- Cabled connections to every trading position; wireless for meetings only.
- Uninterruptible power on desk equipment and the comms cabinet.
- Monitoring that reports degradation, not only outage.
Market data and the systems that feed the desk
Trading desks run vendor terminals and data feeds that have their own connectivity requirements, their own support arrangements and often their own hardware. These are not systems an office IT provider should reconfigure, and the sensible arrangement mirrors the one we use for operational technology elsewhere: the vendor owns the platform, we own the network and the environment it sits in.
In practice that means making sure the feed has the path and the priority it needs, that a firewall rule change does not silently break a terminal, and that when the vendor says the problem is the network we can answer with evidence rather than opinion. That evidence comes from monitoring, which is the thing most desks discover they lack on the day of a dispute.
Communications you may have to produce
Trading conversations happen across email, chat, voice and increasingly messaging apps on personal phones. Whatever your regulatory position, the commercial reality is that disputes about what was agreed, and at what price, are resolved by whoever can produce the record. A firm whose deal conversations live on individual employees' WhatsApp accounts cannot produce anything.
The workable answer is to decide deliberately which channels are for business, capture and retain those, and make it clear that others are not. Retention is then configured against how long you might need the record rather than left at a platform default, which is usually far shorter than a commercial dispute takes to surface. Microsoft documents the mechanics in its guidance on how retention works.
This is a policy decision before it is a technical one, and it needs someone senior to make it. We configure what you decide and document what was configured.
The payment instruction is the target
A commodity trading firm moves large sums to counterparties, often quickly, often internationally, and frequently against instructions that arrive by email. That combination makes it one of the most attractive targets in Dubai for business email compromise, and the attack does not require sophistication. An attacker reads a mailbox quietly for a fortnight, learns the pattern, then alters bank details on a genuine invoice at a moment when a payment is expected.
Two controls defeat this. Multi-factor authentication on every mailbox stops the account takeover that starts it. And a written rule that any change to counterparty bank details is confirmed by telephone, to a number you already hold rather than one in the email, stops the payment even if the mailbox was read. The second control costs nothing and is the one that actually works, which is why we insist on it being a documented procedure rather than a habit.
The CIS Critical Security Controls cover the technical baseline around this, and our cyber security audit tests whether it is genuinely in place rather than nominally enabled.
Small headcount, disproportionate exposure
Trading firms are often small: a handful of traders, an operations team, finance, and not much else. That headcount does not match the exposure, and it creates a specific risk, which is concentration. One person often holds the systems knowledge, the administrator passwords and the counterparty relationships.
The mitigations are unglamorous. Administrator access separated from daily accounts and held by more than one person. Documentation that means the business is not dependent on somebody's memory. And credentials in a company password manager rather than a personal one, so a departure does not become a lockout. For a firm where a single day of disruption can exceed a year of IT budget, this is the cheapest insurance available.
Where Dubai trading firms sit
Most are in DIFC, DMCC or Business Bay, and the location shapes the practical work. DIFC firms face the strongest documentation expectations and the most client due diligence; DMCC has its own licensing framework and a large commodities community; Business Bay towers bring fit-out approvals and shared risers. Our DIFC and JLT and DMCC pages cover what differs building by building.
Wherever the desk sits, we check what connectivity each provider can genuinely deliver to that floor before designing failover, because a second line from the same physical route is not redundancy.
Setting up a trading desk
A survey of the floor, a conversation about which systems the desk depends on and who supports them, and a decision from you about which communication channels are for business. That produces a fixed-scope proposal covering dual connectivity and failover, cabling and power at the desk, segmentation, retention configuration, the security baseline and a tested backup. Listonics projects run from AED 2,500 to AED 30,000 depending on requirement.
Support is a fixed monthly fee with response times set around trading hours rather than office hours, because a desk problem at seven in the morning is not something that waits until nine.
Frequently asked questions
We support the network and environment those platforms run on, not the platforms themselves, which stay with the vendor. In practice that means ensuring the feed has the path and priority it needs, that firewall changes do not silently break a terminal, and that when a vendor says the problem is the network we can answer with monitoring evidence.
Because the cost of a dropped session is not proportional to headcount. A ten-person trading desk can lose more in an hour offline than a hundred-person back office. Two lines from different providers, on genuinely different physical routes, with automatic failover on the firewall, turns an outage into a slower morning.
That depends on your regulatory position, which is a question for your compliance advisers rather than for us. Commercially, disputes about what was agreed are settled by whoever can produce the record, so most firms decide which channels are for business, capture those, and set retention against how long a dispute takes to surface.
A written procedure requiring telephone confirmation to a number you already hold, never a number in the email requesting the change, plus multi-factor authentication on every mailbox. The technical control stops the account takeover; the telephone call stops the payment even when the takeover succeeded. Both, and documented rather than habitual.
More than most, because trading firms combine small headcount with high value. Separate administrator access from daily accounts and hold it with more than one person, document the environment so it does not live in somebody's memory, and keep credentials in a company password manager. It is the cheapest risk reduction available to a firm this size.
Yes, and it should. Covered hours are set around when your desk actually trades, including early starts for European or Asian sessions, with maintenance scheduled outside them. A fixed monthly fee with written response times means a seven o'clock problem has a defined answer rather than depending on who picks up.
Written by Srinivasan Ramachandran, Founder, Listonics · Last reviewed September 28, 2026