Watch: Subram Natarajan on the IBM public cloud platform for financial institutions

Last November, technology giant IBM announced that it had designed the world’s first financial services ready public cloud, with Bank of America as the first adopter.

Financial institutions have traditionally shied away from embracing public or hybrid cloud, given the cybersecurity issues as well as regulatory concerns. However, the Covid-19 pandemic has forced financial institutions to rethink their cloud strategy. 

Bank of America has adopted the IBM FSS (financial services solutions) public cloud to host key applications and workloads of the bank’s 66 million customers. 

In an interview with TechCircle, the chief technology officer of IBM in India, Subram Natarajan, talks about the company’s FSS public cloud. 

“With the advent of hybrid cloud utility abstractions extended to platform and software levels and we saw various forms of PaaS (platform as a service), as well as SaaS (software-as-a-service), emerging,  so there were a lot of benefits coming across,” Subram Natarajan, CTO of IBM India told TechCircle. 

According to IBM, FSS cloud addresses the requirements in terms of regulatory compliance, security and resiliency, which will in turn help the institutions with controls for multi-architecture support, automated security and regulatory workloads. 

Read: Persistent, Red Hat launch centre of excellence to accelerate hybrid cloud adoption 

The FSS cloud runs on IBM’s public cloud which utilises Red Hat OpenShift as its primary kubernetes platform to manage containerised software. IBM said that the FSS solution has more than 190 API (application programming interface) based PaaS services that can be used to create secure cloud native applications.