IBM announced the general availability of the industry’s first financial services-ready cloud platform, IBM Cloud for financial services, now including support for Red Hat OpenShift and other cloud-native services. First revealed in 2019, the IBM Cloud for Financial Services was designed in collaboration with Bank of America. Since then, IBM has built a cloud environment capable of supporting the needs of the financial services industry for their mission-critical workload and data protection, with our compliance capabilities and industry-leading security. The IBM Cloud for Financial Services is designed to help to reduce the risk for financial institutions, their partners and FinTechs, and innovate quickly with built-in controls that are adhered to by the entire ecosystem.
In addition to Bank of America, IBM is working with several global financial institutions such as BNP Paribas, Luminor Bank, MUFG and more. The IBM Cloud for Financial Services is supported by an ecosystem of more than 90 collaboration partners including new additions EY and Tata Consultancy Services, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Software as a Service (SaaS) providers. As part of the announcement, SAP has joined the IBM Cloud for Financial Services ecosystem, giving clients a diverse set of applications to deploy via the platform.
“Together with some of the world’s largest banks and leaders in regulatory compliance we are driving a change in cloud adoption for highly regulated industries, aiming to improve the security and compliance posture for the industry,” said Howard Boville, Head of IBM Hybrid Cloud Platform. “With a focus on data security delivered with IBM’s confidential computing and sophisticated encryption capabilities, we aim to reduce risk in the supply chain for banks, insurers and other financial services industry players, and at the same time accelerating the time by which they can drive and consume innovation.”
Secured Platform Designed for Open Innovation
With the general availability of IBM Cloud for Financial Services, the financial services industry, including technology partners, can now build applications with Red Hat OpenShift, migrate virtual machine workloads, and establish compliance profiles across their workloads– to help support their continuous compliance needs. Financial services institutions can now accelerate their cloud journeys with IBM Cloud for Financial Services’ built-in security and compliance controls for both cloud-native and VMware workloads.
IBM Cloud for Financial Services is built on IBM Cloud, the industry’s most secure and open cloud for business, which uses Red Hat OpenShift as its primary Kubernetes environment to manage containerised software across the enterprise, and includes more than 200 API driven, cloud-native PaaS services to create new and enhanced cloud-native apps. Developer and ecosystem partners can build and modernise in a secured environment to drive innovation for today’s modern customer.
Safeguard Data with Confidential Computing
To protect data across cloud-native and VMware workloads, IBM Cloud for Financial Services uses IBM’s fourth-generation confidential computing capabilities and ‘Keep Your Own Key’ encryption delivered via IBM Hyper Protect Services and backed by the highest level of security certification commercially available. This gives enterprises technology-backed control of their own encryption keys so clients are the only ones who can control access to their data. This same hardware-based assurance enables confidential computing, meaning that financial institutions can process critical data in a secured enclave within a shared cloud environment.
To ease cloud adoption for financial services clients IBM developed IBM Cloud for Financial Services to help address the security and regulatory requirements of the heavily regulated industry. Central to the platform is the IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services which delivers an industry-informed set of security and compliance controls to operate securely with bank-sensitive data in the public cloud.
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SAP Joins IBM Cloud for Financial Services Ecosystem
IBM Cloud for Financial Services established a growing ecosystem of more than 90 ISVs and SaaS providers to help enable financial services organisations to integrate offerings from third-party providers and modernise core applications to improve the customer experience. With the addition of SAP, clients can now quickly engage with the largest enterprise app company across their workloads.
IBM will guide ISV and SaaS providers through each step of the onboarding process, which includes a technical and security assessment, workload migration, and readiness validation designed to address third- and fourth-party risk. The IBM Cloud for Financial Services features a control framework designed to help financial institutions reduce expenses and accelerate revenue growth while fostering a secure and compliant partner ecosystem.
This process supports partner compliance initiatives with the IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services requirements and efficient onboarding through a systematic approach supported by IBM’s technical, security, and regulatory teams.
