The financial services-ready public cloud provides an opportunity for financial institutions to assess the security, resiliency and compliance of their technology vendors
US-based IT firm International Business Machines (IBM) has developed a financial services-ready public cloud for financial services institutions and their suppliers.
IBM said that its new offering marks the first services-ready public cloud in the world, and the Bank of America will use the platform to host key applications and workloads that support the privacy and safety expectations of its 66 million banking customers.
Bank of America chief operations and technology officer Cathy Bessant said: “This is one of the most important collaborations in the financial services industry cloud space. 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.”
Financial services-ready public cloud provides regulatory compliance, security and resiliency
The financial services-ready public cloud has been designed to help address the requirements of financial services institutions for regulatory compliance, security and resiliency.
The solution provides an opportunity for financial institutions to assess the security, resiliency and compliance of their technology vendors, and provides security validation for participating financial services software providers.
The new public cloud solution is intended to run on its public cloud, using Red Hat OpenShift as its primary Kubernetes environment to manage containerised software across the enterprise, and includes more than 190 API-driven, cloud-native PaaS services facilitating new and enhanced cloud-native apps.
IBM said that it has intensively collaborated with Bank of America to help develop the control requirements for the financial services-ready public cloud-based platform.
In addition, the new public cloud is capable of enabling Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers to focus on core offerings. Only ISVs or SaaS providers complying with the platform’s policies are allowed to deliver offerings through the platform.
IBM global industries, clients, platforms and blockchain senior vice-president Bridget van Kralingen said: “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.
“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.”