IBM has created a cloud practice for regulated businesses with a focus on financial services.
“IBM is in a strong position to deliver technology to mission-critical services in financial services around the world.
Howard Boville, SVP and Head of IBM Cloud Platform
Courtesy IBM
The U.S. Treasury Department recently report Regarding financial services and the cloud, it points out concerns about the amount of information that cloud service providers (CSPs) expose to financial services firms, the concentration of service providers, and differences in regulation around the world.
IBM is working with an active group of over 130 financial institutions (IBM Financial Services Cloud Council) to learn from cloud providers and incorporate requirements such as compliance and security into cloud services.
Between 2012 and 2014, the cloud has become a general-purpose resource, not mission-critical, and certainly not regulated, Boville said. The company is discussing third- and fourth-party risk management with financial institutions, he added.
“In the past, when a bank purchased software, it would reside in the bank’s data center with the bank’s security and management capabilities. This can be a real risk if your cloud provider doesn’t have the security and controls in place because it’s a cloud.”
Cloud computing users expect their services to be up and running, but 2021 saw many service outages at cloud providers. AWS has stopped him three times in December. washington post report. Boville said many outages by general-purpose cloud providers are not well publicized. Anyone who wants to see what’s happening on the internet can download a free smartphone app. down detector.
“This shows the vulnerability of general-purpose cloud providers,” he added.
IBM’s financial services cloud operates at 99.99999% availability, while the general-purpose cloud offers 399.99%, he said.
“That doesn’t apply to financial services.”
Performance is also a key financial concern, he added. If your cloud-powered call center runs slow, it’s not a big deal, but when your data center runs trillions of payments, slow isn’t an option. He recommends a hybrid approach to cloud.
“If you have three data centers, you need a network to connect them. It’s not uncommon for the fiber to be dug up by backhoes, so even if you have three data centers, it can fail. That’s why we recommend hybrid cloud: your own data center and a cloud data center.
He also recommends that users have two data center providers. IBM works with his AWS and Microsoft.
“You can’t build resilience with just one, and you don’t want to be locked out of the innovation that cloud providers are doing.”
IBM is more than just a cloud provider, so we offer our customers some perspective on how their businesses can use the cloud.
“If you’re working with a cloud provider, the answer is the cloud. What’s the next question?” Boville pointed out. “Financial services companies rushed into brilliant new technology thinking the cloud would solve all their problems, but technology is just a tool.”
He calls the result a FrankenCloud — a bit of this and that.
“It should be built on solid architectural principles.”
A growing trend he sees is that nations, especially in Europe, are looking to cloud-based financial services and asking how they can protect their citizens’ data. France is leading the way by joining platforms called Capgemini, Orange and Microsoft. blue Meanwhile, Thales, a major French defense contractor, is working with Google on its trusted cloud.through a newly formed company called S3NS.
Europeans to raise concerns about the US Patriot Act without anyone in Ireland being informed after a subpoena was served on an Irish account held in a US hyperscaler (cloud provider) says Boville. IBM does not hold encryption keys, unlike other cloud providers for financial services.
“Even with a subpoena from the state, we were unable to provide encrypted data.”
Boville believes the big growth area for the cloud will move beyond customer applications to business processes using third-party apps. Third-party apps, built less and less by banks, use APIs to plug and play and power your business.
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