IBM, Bank of America collaborate on financial services public cloud

Technology giant IBM has designed the first-ever financial services-ready public cloud and has partnered with Bank of America as an early adopter of the platform.

Big Blue’s platform, which is built under its public cloud, will host key applications and workloads to keep Bank of America’s 66 million customers’ data secure.

The new platform is designed to help address specific requirements of financial services institutions for regulatory compliance, security and resiliency.

"This is one of the most important collaborations in the financial services industry cloud space," said Cathy Bessant, chief operations and technology officer, Bank of America in a statement.

IBM public cloud uses Red Hat OpenShift as its primary Kubernetes environment to manage containerized software across the enterprise.

To help promote a regulatory compliant environment, IBM and Bank of America are already working with Promontory, an IBM business unit and a global leader in financial services regulatory compliance consulting.

Gartner predicts that the worldwide public cloud service market will grow from $182.4B in 2018 to $331.2B in 2022.

Public clouds offer benefits like reduced costs of operations and increased storage. However, banks have been hesitant to move their data to public clouds due to concerns over security and compliance issues. 

The banking industry is one of the top targets of hackers using phishing attacks. According to Kaspersky Lab, in 2018, the number of users attacked with banking Trojans was 889,452, which was an increase of 15.9% in comparison with 767,072 in 2017 globally.