IBM announced that it has designed the world’s first financial services-ready public cloud. IBM will welcome financial services institutions, and their suppliers, to join the financial services-ready public cloud.
The financial services-ready public cloud has been designed to help address the requirements of financial services institutions for regulatory compliance, security and resiliency. This will help financial institutions transact with technology vendors who have met the platform’s requirements. It is the only industry-specific public cloud platform that can provide preventative and compensatory controls for financial services regulatory workloads, multi-architecture support and proactive and automated security, leveraging the industry’s highest levels of encryption certification.
The financial services-ready public cloud can potentially enable Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers – from the smallest FinTechs to more established vendors – to focus on their core offerings to financial institutions with the controls for the platform put in place.
The financial services-ready public cloud is expected to run on IBM’s public cloud, which uses Red Hat OpenShift as its primary Kubernetes environment to manage containerized software across the enterprise, and includes more than 190 API driven, cloud native PaaS services to create new and enhanced cloud-native apps.
The project draws upon technology and financial services industry experience earned through IBM’s relationships with 47 of the Fortune 50 companies and the 10 largest financial institutions in the world. Additionally, to help promote a regulatory compliant environment, IBM and Bank of America are working with Promontory, an IBM business unit and a global leader in financial services regulatory compliance consulting.
The financial services-ready public cloud will help give financial institutions an opportunity to more efficiently assess the security, resiliency and compliance of their technology vendors. Participating financial services software providers may benefit from the platform’s security validation. Only ISV or SaaS providers that demonstrate they comply with the platform’s policies will be eligible to deliver offerings through the platform.
