What Spanugo’s Public Cloud Offering Brings to IBM’s Clients: A Q&A With Hillery Hunter, CTO of IBM Cloud

On June 15, 2020, IBM announced the acquisition of assets from Spanugo, a U.S.-based provider of cloud cybersecurity management solutions.

Hillery Hunter, CTO of IBM Cloud, explains how this acquisition will help clients in regulated industries make their journey to the cloud.

What’s unique about Spanugo, and what’s the reasoning behind IBM’s acquisition?
What attracted us to Spanugo’s technology and leaders was their deep understanding of the security and compliance which highly regulated enterprises like banks, hospitals, telcos require when hosting their workloads in a public cloud. IBM has always had strong customer relationships in those industries, so the synergy between us was an obvious match.

Why did IBM and Spanugo join forces now?
Enterprises everywhere are concerned with the proper stewardship of data—whether their own or their client’s—which is why cloud security assurance continues to be so important. IBM has in-market capabilities in security posture management and a leadership position in data protection (through our Keep Your Own Key [KYOK] services). The acquisition of Spanugo helps extend and expand the security and compliance capabilities for the benefit of our cloud clients.

Why should companies adopt public cloud?
More than ever, today's business environment demands elasticity in data usage, flexibility in its deployment, and the optimization of IT costs. Public cloud enables enterprises to run more efficiently, compete more effectively, and deliver a much wider array of services both to their employees and their customers.

Is hosting data in public cloud safer for companies than hosting in-house?
Studies have shown that a move to public cloud can result in an improvement in a company’s security and compliance posture overall. On IBM public cloud, data can be protected with the industry's highest-level of certification for cryptography (FIPS 140-2 Level 4), configurable so that our customers retain complete control of their data. This crypto card certification level is higher than what many enterprises use in-house.

How will public cloud transform the financial services industry?
Public cloud offers the opportunity to transform how financial institutions do business in critical ways. The speed and flexibility of cloud enables enterprises to modernize applications, deliver richer consumer experiences, optimize business processes and reduce costs. It will also let financial institutions decide whether to source services in-house or outside, and can keep them from falling behind in innovation.