Think about the kinds of experiences customers expect in today’s digital-first world - they are both fast and frictionless. While these experiences should appear seamless to the customer, there is a lot that must go on behind the scenes to make this possible. As the ever-changing demands of consumers set the pace for the future, enterprises need to adopt the right technologies – including those that enable high performance and security – or get left behind. 

Building on its mission to help reduce risk for highly regulated industries with resiliency, security, compliance and performance at the forefront, IBM Cloud will be among the first cloud providers to deliver 4th Gen Intel®  Xeon®  Scalable processors1. With these advancements, clients can take advantage of high performance, enhanced security and fast memory -- which are especially important for the financial sector, machine learning, artificial intelligence, simulation and other high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. 

At a time where businesses are consuming and generating more data than ever before, keeping data secure and accessible at any time, from anywhere in the world, has never been more important. To enable clients to gain secured data access, IBM is helping them make the choices for where and how their workloads are hosted, which can allow them to derive benefit for a sustained period.

Here are five things to know:

1. Accelerating secured innovation with Intel – IBM and Intel have long shared a deep commitment to helping enterprises solve their unique business challenges and prioritize their compute performance and data security capabilities. To do this, it is critical that organizations implement a secured cloud infrastructure – one that is designed with a purpose-built, workload-first approach and that can scale to address today’s performance demands. 
   
   In the coming months, IBM Cloud will expand availability of the just launched 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors – which Intel has declared are aimed at delivering the highest performance increases and fastest memory in the market today – across bare metal servers, virtual servers and HPC platforms. Intel’s next generation processor is designed to help clients unlock new performance gains by speeding up data movement and throughput to remove bottlenecks. Additionally, Intel promotes the offering as including advanced confidential computing data security capabilities with new Intel Trust Domain Extensions (Intel TDX) and Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) feature sets to help clients protect what matters most and, enable them to host applications and workloads in a secured environment.
    
2. Safeguarding data at high levels of security – Maintaining privacy is paramount for enterprises to retain customer trust. It is critical that organizations do not fall victim to a Frankencloud construct – a set of cloud deployments that are so disconnected they are nearly impossible to secure and can create blind spots for bad actors to attack. As enterprises navigate these challenges, IBM continues to put data security and trust at the very center of our technology which includes a variety of offerings and services, including IBM’s innovative confidential computing capabilities and “Keep Your Own Key” (KYOK) encryption powered by IBM Z and LinuxONE. With these capabilities, only the client retains sole access to the keys meaning data is visible only to them and no one else – not even IBM can access it. 
    
3. Addressing needs of regulated industries – As regulations grow, clients in highly regulated industries such as financial services must stay ahead of the latest requirements. To help clients address these challenges, IBM introduced IBM Cloud for Financial Services in collaboration with Bank of America in 2019 – a first-of-its-kind cloud designed by the industry to help clients as they work to mitigate risk, address evolving regulations and accelerate cloud adoption. With built-in security and compliance controls, the platform aims to help financial services organizations address the industry’s unique cybersecurity and regulatory requirements, while providing the benefits and flexibility of the cloud in a secured environment. Since its introduction in 2019, our expansive ecosystem has grown to more than 130 technology partners and fintechs that are helping financial institutions address 3^rd and 4^th party risk through a common set of security and compliance controls that are adhered to by the ecosystem. 
4. Focusing on security and compliance – The IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services, designed to help clients automate their security and compliance posture, is central to the platform and has recently been mapped to the Cloud Security Alliance’s Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) – a cybersecurity control framework for cloud computing, which can help clients to drive innovation while addressing third and fourth party risk. 
   
   As clients strive to achieve a rapid pace of innovation, they also need to continuously deliver capabilities with security built-in and stay compliance focused. The IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center positions clients to define prescriptive controls based on risk and regulations, implement controls built-in to their hybrid cloud deployments, and assess their security and compliance posture.

5. Managing security across hybrid, multicloud environments – As cyber threats continue to grow in complexity, it is more important than ever before to know who has access to your data – particularly when managing sensitive financial, healthcare or government data. With IBM’s Unified Key Orchestrator cloud service, enterprises can perform key management across hybrid, multicloud environments and gain a unified view of their data security posture, helping to mitigate risk to their critical data. Built for today’s hybrid cloud world, the service empowers businesses to take advantage of IBM’s cloud security capabilities – where their data resides – including on other clouds and on-premises. Additionally, with IBM Cloud Satellite we’re helping clients keep data secured where it is needed – including on IBM Cloud, other clouds and on-premises. 
    

Trust and choice have always been at the heart of our work with clients. As businesses modernize, we’re giving clients one single point of control to allow them to know who has access to their critical data at all times – even on other clouds.

As clients in highly regulated industries continue to navigate evolving security and compliance demands, our mission continues to help them deploy mission-critical workloads securely and with confidence. 

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

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