NEW YORK – IBM says it has designed the world’s first “financial services-ready” public cloud – and it’s already got its first sign up.
Bank of America is collaborating by hosting “key applications and workloads” on the cloud to support its some 66 million banking customers.
The company has reportedly been migrating to the cloud and has a hybrid architecture.
IBM said is the only “industry-specific” public cloud platform supporting various financial services requirements ranging from regulatory to privacy.
“It represents a technology ecosystem where regulations can be addressed,” said IBM’s Senior Vice President Bridget van Kralingen, in a statement.
“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.”
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IBM’s public cloud is run using Red Hat OpenShift as its Kubernetes environment.
Meanwhile, Bank of America is also working with IBM-unit Promotory that focuses of regulatory consulting.
Big Blue said it is hoping to appeal to the “smallest FinTechs to more established vendors.”
Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) that “demonstrate they comply with the platform’s policies” will be eligible to sign up for the platform, it said.
“This is one of the most important collaborations in the financial services industry cloud space,” said Cathy Bessant, Bank of America’s chief operations and technology officer, in a statement.
“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.”
