ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that clients in highly regulated industries, including Aegean Airlines, BNP Paribas, Elaw Tecnologia SA and Home Trust, are selecting IBM Cloud as their preferred destination for mission-critical workloads.

IBM also announced new capabilities that make its public cloud the industry's most secure and open cloud for business, including:

• The industry's only commercially available state-of-art cryptographic technology for the cloud called "Keep Your Own Key."¹ This gives enterprises the ability to retain control of their own encryption keys -- and the hardware security modules that protect them -- so customers are the only ones who can control access to their data.
• Increased bandwidth for its next-gen virtual servers on the cloud up to 80 Gbps, making the IBM public cloud hyperscale-ready. Designed so enterprises can access IBM public cloud services and scale their networks quicker than ever before, all within a controlled, secured environment that is suited for sensitive workloads.
• An expansion of IBM's global cloud data center footprint with new multizone regions (MZR) planned for Toronto, Canada and Osaka, Japan by the end of 2020, building on the recently announced MZR in Sao Paulo, Brazil. These regions will help clients quickly deploy mission-critical workloads and applications across hybrid cloud environments, and gain access to a consistent set of IBM public cloud services – from enterprise-grade infrastructure to AI services.
• The same IBM Power Systems technology behind the world's smartest supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, is expected to be available for select geographies by the end of 2019 in the IBM Cloud giving organizations a new, powerful option to begin developing and training their AI applications. IBM's support of Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power Systems reinforces our commitment to clients to provide a flexible, secure and open, hybrid multicloud platform for their workloads.
• New features to be made available for IBM Security Advisor to detect security misconfigurations so companies can better assess their security postures and take corrective actions.

IBM reported last week that its cloud business generated more than $20 billion dollars in revenue over the last 12 months. Today's news complements IBM's existing cloud offerings for private and on-premises environments – including those from recently-acquired Red Hat – enabling the company to provide comprehensive, open multicloud hybrid solutions.

"Open architectures, based on Kubernetes and containers, are driving the next wave of cloud-based innovation. That's why IBM has just completed a two-year journey to enhance its public cloud on a foundation of open source software," said Arvind Krishna, Senior Vice President, Cloud and Cognitive Software, IBM. "Today, we are going a step further by unveiling new capabilities for the IBM public cloud, designed to provide clients with the highest available level of security, leading data protection and enterprise-grade infrastructure to run Red Hat OpenShift."

Aegean Airlines has adopted IBM Cloud to transform its internal business processes and further enhance its customer experience. 

"IBM is the strategic provider that will support our determination and willingness to innovate and achieve excellence at both organizational and business process level," said AEGEAN Group's Chief Information Office, Aristeidis Kamvysis. "By utilizing IBM Cloud, we're able to infuse IBM Watson into our applications in order to gain better business insights, while improving business operations in a reliable, scalable, and agile environment."

With the consumer experience a top priority, banks like BNP Paribas must deal with the rapidly changing needs of customers, while also managing evolving security and regulatory guidelines, and a variety of complex data and workloads.

BNP Paribas is leveraging the IBM Cloud and adopting a hybrid cloud strategy to overcome these challenges and support its development and innovation within the ever-increasing need for security and compliance. This includes a BNP Paribas dedicated cloud based on IBM public cloud technology that offers the best of both worlds: the security of a private cloud, with the breadth of catalog and economics of a public cloud. Due to launch in mid 2020, it will provide access to the full range of IBM Cloud IaaS and PaaS services, including IBM's Watson AI services, and will run in a Multizone Region dedicated to BNP Paribas in the Paris area to provide high availability and resilience. BNP Paribas will migrate its IT and applications to this dedicated cloud, complementing it with the IBM public cloud in the US, Asia and Europe. Together, BNP Paribas and IBM look to define and establish the cloud platform to help meet the regulatory and security controls facing BNP Paribas' critical banking workloads.

"With the increasing regulation restrictions in the financial services industry, institutions have been historically challenged to use cloud, and public clouds in particular. By working with IBM, we are able to provide the innovation and agility that public clouds can offer, combined with the security necessary to remain compliant," said Bernard Gavgani, BNP Paribas Group Chief Information Officer. "This approach enables us to innovate faster, provide a better customer experience, enter into new business models and tap into new technologies, such as AI."

Together with IBM, Elaw Tecnologia SA, a company that specializes in the development of corporate solutions for legal management, created a new cognitive solution that automates cumbersome and high-volume legal tasks, hosted on IBM Cloud.

"The strict labor laws in Brazil result in a vast number of labor lawsuits. To streamline legal processes, we worked with IBM to develop a AI-enabled legal process management solution to improve efficiency and productivity for our lawyers," said Guilherme Bordon, Chief Executive Officer, Elaw. "The solution is hosted on IBM Cloud to enable Elaw to access IBM Watson APIs, automate processes and provide a secured platform for confidential information."

Home Trust, a federally regulated trust company based in Canada, recently migrated its IT infrastructure to IBM's public cloud to transform its operations, while still maintaining end-to-end visibility and management over its platforms and applications. By migrating to the cloud, Home Trust now has access to flexible and scalable computing services, as well as access to higher value technologies, including AI, to digitally transform its offerings.

"For many financial institutions, upgrading core systems can disrupt underlying business operations and impact efficiency," said Victor DiRisio, Chief Information Officer at Home Trust. "By choosing IBM Cloud, we are able to modernize our IT environment while realizing the economic benefits of cloud computing. It ensures that new solutions are immediately useable, rapidly deployable and can ultimately offer a superior customer experience."

For more information on today's news, visit https://www.ibm.com/cloud/blog/announcing-new-public-cloud-capabilities 

About IBM Cloud
With over $20B in annual cloud revenue, IBM has built a leading enterprise hybrid cloud business. This includes a comprehensive range of as-a-service offerings, software, hardware and professional services that enable IBM to advise, move, build and manage cloud solutions across public, private and on-premises environments. Through its global network of more than 60 cloud data centers across 19 countries and 18 availability zones across 6 regions, IBM public cloud helps enterprises in all industries to meet security, resiliency, performance, and global deployment requirements. Built on an open source, multitenant environment, clients have secured access to an enterprise-grade IaaS and a leading PaaS that provides them with the latest developer capabilities and ready-to-go innovation engines. This includes more than 190 cloud-native APIs, such as AI, blockchain, IoT, serverless and quantum computing, and consistent function all the way to the edge.

For more information, visit https://www.ibm.com/cloud/public 

Statements regarding IBM's future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.

¹ Encryption keys and cryptographic operations are protected with highest level certified HSM -  with Hyper Protect Cryto services: FIPS 140-2 Level 4.

Contact:
Faye Abloeser
IBM Media Relations
abloeser@us.ibm.com

SOURCE IBM