IBM Cloud for Financial Services

Today your business model and your technology are under significant strain.

External conditions such as COVID-19 are driving extreme volatility in channel usage, in transaction volumes, and product demand. Your legacy systems may lack the resiliency needed to handle these challenges. Current customer behaviors and workloads are likely to shift quickly and dramatically again; placing your systems, your costs and your people under perpetual strain. You are faced with infrastructure that is slow and expensive. Additionally, different executives each with their own set of concerns makes moving to the public cloud seem daunting. 

These limitations and concerns are why banks have moved fewer than 20% of all workloads to the cloud, and virtually no complex workloads or those involving sensitive data. Until you find a way to safely and securely migrate and manage substantially greater workloads on the cloud, you will operate at this disadvantage. But it doesn’t have to be this way–it IS possible for banks to benefit fully from public cloud. 

Introducing IBM Cloud for Financial Services

To help enable financial institutions to transform, IBM developed IBM Cloud for Financial Services, built on the IBM Cloud. By working with Bank of America to develop industry informed security control requirements, on-site embedded IT services and leveraging IBM Promontory, the global leader in financial services regulatory compliance, IBM Cloud for Financial Services provides the level of data security and regulatory compliance financial institutions are mandated to adhere to, along with public cloud scale and innovation they want. With this comes the introduction of the IBM Cloud Policy Framework for Financial Services, exclusively available, which deploys a shared-responsibility model for implementing controls. It is designed to enable financial institutions and their ecosystem partners to confidently host apps and workloads in the cloud and be able to demonstrate regulatory compliance significantly faster and more efficiently than they are today.

Workloads will be run on IBM Cloud for VMware Regulated Workloads, a secure, automated reference architecture that enhances VMware vCenter Server on IBM Cloud to deliver a security rich, high-performance platform for VMware workloads in regulated industries. Designed to enable a zero-trust model, this architecture offers our clients in regulated industries a strategic approach to securely extend and scale their VMware IT operations into the IBM Cloud while maintaining compliance.

With nearly thirty ISVs and partners, procurement, contracting and onboarding within the ecosystem can be streamlined, leading to increased revenues and reduced time to market for all parties.

IBM Cloud for your workloads

IBM Cloud for Financial Services is exclusively available in North America, but you can still take advantage of all the products and services IBM Cloud has to offer in our 60-plus global data centers. 

IBM can help you build a strategy for global, regional, industry and government compliance

• IBM Promontory® for financial services sector (FSS) workloads—operating at the intersection of strategy, risk management, technology and regulation
• Strong commitment to our European clients (PCI-DSS and EBA briefing)

Maintain control of your cloud environment and your data

• Client-key management (BYOK and KYOK)
• Visibility and auditability with physical-asset management and logging and monitoring
• Full control of the stack, with transparency for audit purposes, right down to the serial number of the server

Security leadership with market-leading data protection

• Clients can keep their own key that no one else can see—so not even IBM operators can access the key or the data it protects, unlike other cloud vendors. IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Services is designed to give clients the control of the cloud data-encryption keys and cloud hardware-security module (HSM)—the only service in the industry with FIPS 140-2 Level 4 certification.
• Each workload requires various access and security rules; IBM enables organizations to define and enforce such guidelines by way of integrated container security and DevSecOps for cloudnative applications with IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service.
• IBM Cloud Security Advisor detects security misconfigurations so organizations can better assess their security postures and take corrective actions for all parties

Reduce complexity and speed innovation

• IBM Garage™ for quick creation and scaling of new ideas that can dramatically impact your business
• With IBM’s vast ISV and partner ecosystem, banks can reduce overhead and the time and effort to ensure compliance of third-party vendors and more time delivering new services

 

“We received the best of both worlds: the innovation and speed benefits of the IBM public cloud with the high security of a private cloud.” — Bernard Gavgani, Global Chief Information Officer, BNP Paribas

 

Why IBM?

Built on a foundation of open source software, security leadership and enterprise-grade hardware, IBM Cloud provides the flexibility needed to help relieve the headaches caused when managing workloads often associated with moving to the cloud. IBM Cloud offers the lowest cloud vendor costs and the broadest portfolio of secure-compute choices with a wide array of enterprise-grade security IT services in San Diego and products to help those in regulated industries. And most recently, IBM Cloud has been recognized as a 2019 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide. The vendors with this distinction have been highly rated by their customers. Read the announcement to learn more.