IBM Is Developing World's First Financial Services-Ready Public Cloud

IBM Is Developing World's First Financial Services-Ready Public Cloud
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IBM has designed the world's first financial services-ready public cloud. The company said that it will welcome financial services institutions, and their suppliers, to join the financial services-ready public cloud.

Bank of America announced it will be a committed collaborator to use the platform built on IBM's public cloud. The Bank will host key applications and workloads to support the requirements and privacy and safety expectations of its 66 million banking customers.

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.

To help develop the control requirements for the platform, IBM has collaborated intensively with Bank of America. 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.

"This is one of the most important collaborations in the financial services industry cloud space," said Cathy Bessant, chief operations and technology officer, Bank of America. "This industry-first platform will allow Bank of America to use the public cloud, putting data security, resiliency, privacy and customer information safety needs at the forefront of decision making. By setting a standard that addresses the concern of hosting highly-confidential information, we aim to drive the public cloud to a safety level that is unmatched.

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 financial services-ready public cloud represents an ongoing focus from Bank of America, IBM and Promontory to help develop a technology ecosystem where regulations can be addressed," said Bridget van Kralingen, Senior Vice President, Global Industries, Clients, Platforms & Blockchain, IBM. "Together we plan to help our customer address their ongoing compliance requirements, coupled with highly scalable, standardized capabilities that will be built to help serve today's modern financial services industry.