IBM’s public cloud for banking is now generally available

A year and a half after announcing the project, IBM is launching what it says is the world's first financial services-ready public cloud platform.

Developed in collaboration with Bank of America, the “IBM Cloud for Financial Services” will set a compliance framework for vendors and software providers, the company said.

“The IBM Cloud for Financial Services is designed to help to reduce risk for financial institutions, their partners and FinTechs, and innovate quickly with built-in controls that are adhered to by the entire ecosystem,” IBM said in its announcement. “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.”

With the general availability of IBM Cloud for Financial Services, the financial services industry can build applications with Red Hat OpenShift, migrate virtual machine workloads, and establish compliance profiles across their workloads, the company said. Financial services institutions can use the IBM Cloud’s built-in security and compliance controls for both cloud-native and VMware workloads.

“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,” Boville added.

To protect data across cloud-native and VMware workloads, IBM Cloud for Financial Services uses the tech giant’s fourth-generation confidential computing capabilities and “Keep Your Own Key” workload isolation encryption. This gives enterprises technology-backed control of their 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.