5 Things to Know about the EY & IBM Center of Excellence for Hybrid Cloud Solutions

While businesses and other organizations have been rapidly shifting their operations to the cloud, our study has shown that banking and financial services organizations have so far held back due to significant complexity and primary concerns over security, risk, governance and control.

In fact, according to an IBM survey¹, while 91% percent of financial institutions are actively using cloud services today, or plan to in the next nine months, on average only nine percent of their mission-critical regulated banking workloads have shifted to a public cloud environment.

To enable financial services institutions to accelerate their journeys by addressing regulatory compliance, digital trust and security challenges, EY and IBM are launching a Center of Excellence for new hybrid cloud solutions. Here are five things to know:

1. Best of both worlds

The Center of Excellence is a centralized virtual hub that brings together EY deep financial services industry expertise with IBM’s hybrid cloud and cognitive capabilities to help financial services companies become more customer centric, resilient and competitive in the digital age.

2. Hybrid Cloud solutions built on IBM’s industry specific cloud

Industry-specific cloud offerings like these, available on IBM Cloud for Financial Services and built with Red Hat OpenShift, are essential to increasing cloud adoption in highly regulated industries such as financial services. The IBM Cloud for Financial Services is designed to help to reduce risk for financial institutions, their partners and FinTechs, and innovate quickly with built-in controls that are adhered to by the entire ecosystem.

3. Focused on four core service capabilities

EY and IBM have already launched seven hybrid cloud solutions including multi-hybrid cloud management, application modernization, cloud security and cloud risk management. Clients can benefit from four core areas of expertise:

• Mission critical workload modernization
• Technology risk and compliance focused solutions
• Security solutions
• Multi/hybrid cloud solutions

4. Security and Compliance Focus

To protect data across cloud-native and VMware workloads, IBM Cloud for Financial Services uses IBM's fourth-generation confidential computing capabilities and 'Keep Your Own Key' encryption delivered via IBM Hyper Protect Services and backed by the highest level of security certification commercially available². This gives clients the privacy and control over their data in the cloud – not even IBM can access the data.

5. Builds on existing alliance

The Center of Excellence builds on a global multi-year alliance between EY and IBM.. The alliance supports multiple functional areas comprising M&A, finance, HR, legal, tax, risk and compliance, supply chain and asset management. Most recently, EY launched the IBM TechHub@EY, to strengthen EY teams’ capabilities in IBM hybrid cloud technologies to help organizations accelerate their digital transformation.

The EY and IBM partnership benefits from a $1 billion investment that IBM is making to support its partner ecosystem over the next three years.

^{1 - https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/report/banking-hybrid-multicloud}

^{2 - Based on IBM Hyper Protect Crypto Service, the only service in the industry built on FIPS 140-2 Level 4-certified hardware. FIPS 140-2 Security Level 4 provides the highest level of security defined in this standard. At this security level, the physical security mechanisms provide a comprehensive envelope of protection around the cryptographic module with the intent of detecting and responding to all unauthorized attempts at physical access.}