Whether it’s addressing customer demands for seamless digital experiences or helping clients navigate complex industry regulations, IBM Cloud is committed to helping clients drive innovation today while preparing them for tomorrow.

As enterprises embrace generative AI to drive innovation, the combination of IBM’s AI stack, industry expertise and infrastructure can help them on their journeys. We are bringing the power of foundation models with the availability of a GPU as a service on IBM Cloud offering to help organizations tap into artificial intelligence (AI) in a secured environment while aiming to mitigate third- and fourth-party risk. IBM also recently unveiled watsonx, our next-generation AI and data platform to help enterprises train, validate and deploy AI models.

To further help European companies accelerate their modernization journey, we recently opened our Multi-Zone Region (MZR) in Madrid, Spain. Designed to enable enterprises to deploy their mission-critical workloads in a secured environment, clients leveraging the MZR can take advantage of IBM’s innovative hybrid cloud and AI solutions while addressing their evolving regulatory requirements and data sovereignty.

Additionally, we continue to co-create with clients and partners globally—such as BNP Paribas, Wasabi Technologies, SAP and VMware—and across industries to unlock business value with a hybrid cloud approach.

Here are five things you need to know about how IBM Cloud is helping clients make the right workload-placement decisions based on resiliency, performance, security, compliance and total cost of ownership.

1. Delivering high levels of resiliency

It’s essential for clients to be able to securely manage mission-critical workloads and enable business continuity as they implement strategies to reduce risk and keep pace with market demands. This is why operational resiliency is a key focus for IBM Cloud and is designed to support clients looking to maximize their security posture with a reliable, flexible infrastructure. We continue to make key updates to our cloud infrastructure to drive progress that has resulted in improvements to cloud stability and resiliency, including an 87% year-over-year reduction in Severity 1 Customer Impacting Events (CIEs) and a 38% decrease in Severity 1 CIE disruption time for the same compared periods in 2022 versus 2021.

Dizzion, an innovator in the Managed Desktop as a Service (DaaS) industry, hosts its managed desktop offering on IBM Cloud to help enterprises manage their workforce. With high levels of resiliency, IBM Cloud can help make it easier for Dizzion’s customers to enable their employees to work remotely in a secured and collaborative environment.

“Enterprises need to accelerate digital transformation while giving their workforce the flexibility to work on any device from anywhere in the world. In doing so, it is vital to protect the company’s systems, intellectual property and sensitive data—all without interrupting business performance. IBM Cloud is the most reliable cloud we’ve ever used globally and is an integral component that helps our customers maximize productivity, all while keeping their confidential data secure when working from remote locations,” said Robert Green, CEO of Dizzion.

2. Harnessing the power of performance

Changes and challenges can often be disruptive, but they don’t need to be. With high levels of performance, organizations can better keep up with today’s ever-changing demands.

Earlier this year, IBM Cloud became one of the first cloud providers to deliver 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors to help clients take advantage of higher performance, enhanced security and faster memory. These capabilities are especially critical for machine learning, artificial intelligence, simulation and other high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

Additionally, clients across industries are taking advantage of IBM Cloud® HPC  and grid computing to innovate faster. With its decades-long history of delivering electronic design innovation and offering hosted design services, Cadence Design Systems, Inc. is using IBM Cloud HPC to perform large-scale tasks with speed, helping to accelerate its electronic chip and system design software development.

“Continuity is critical for Cadence when it comes to optimizing operations and having the ability to deliver chip and system design software to customers quickly. Leveraging IBM Cloud as part of our hybrid cloud environment and IBM Spectrum LSF as the HPC workload scheduler, we’ve experienced high-compute utilization, allowing us to utilize our cloud budget and streamline our computational workload,” said Tarak Ray, Cadence corporate vice president and chief information officer.

3. Addressing risks, evolving compliance standards and new regulatory dynamics in highly regulated industries

Recently, the U.S. federal bank regulatory agencies issued updated guidance on how banks can implement robust risk-management strategies when working with third and fourth parties. We believe the strategies outlined in the report reaffirm the importance of working with a cloud provider that enterprises can trust with their data to help them address third- and fourth-party risks.

With IBM Cloud for Financial Services, a first-of-its-kind cloud with built-in controls informed by the industry, we are working to help clients on their missions to mitigate this risk, positioning financial services and other regulated industries to host applications and workloads in the cloud in a secured environment. We are also working with more than 130 technology partners and fintechs to validate their security and compliance posture.

In 2017, IBM was one of the first companies to demonstrate that its services adhered to the EU Cloud Code of Conduct (EU CoC), which aims to align the cloud sector with rigorous technical and organizational measures for effective General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) implementation. Designed to enable cloud service providers to demonstrate evidence of GDPR, IBM has recently achieved the EU CoC level 2 compliance mark, reaffirming our continued dedication to upholding GDPR compliance and marking a new milestone in our ongoing mission to deliver cloud services with confidence.

Additionally, the IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center has evolved to become the cornerstone platform to help our clients and digital partners to manage their risk posture and support their compliance work.

4. Enabling clients to safeguard valuable data with innovative security capabilities

At IBM we are committed to delivering innovative security capabilities (including confidential computing and Keep Your Own Key (KYOK) encryption) that help keep data protected and visible only to its owner and no one else—not even IBM.

As clients work to drive innovation, we continue to work with key industry organizations to further address risk, including our collaboration with the Cloud Security Alliance to advance cloud security and address risk within financial services.

Together, we are also collaborating with major financial institutions like BNP Paribas, Banco Bradesco, Nationwide and Banco Sabadell to further drive the strategic evolution of cloud security in this highly regulated sector. The IBM Financial Services Cloud Council brings together a robust community of financial services professionals, including CIOs, CTOs, CISOs and Compliance and Risk Officers, who are leading a focused effort to advise on the ongoing advancement of the IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services.

 5. Helping clients prioritize total cost of ownership as they derive value from the cloud

It’s essential for enterprises to work with the right cloud providers to minimize additive expenses and complexities to optimize their investments in cloud.

We aim to help materially reduce our clients’ spend on developing and maintaining regulatory controls. The IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services is designed to help clients adapt to emerging industry requirements and compliance obligations to help mitigate the cost and complexity in an evolving regulatory landscape. The extensive control set within the framework includes—but is not limited to—security, data privacy, access management and configuration management. In fact, BNP Paribas, a first-tier international banking group with a presence in more than 65 countries, has reported that this approach can save 30% of the investment costs required to implement the necessary compliance components by working with IBM.

Learn more about how to accelerate innovation in highly regulated industries with IBM Cloud

Innovation cannot be done in silos. It demands the right technology, skills, and support to successfully drive meaningful digital transformation. Wherever your organization is on in its digital transformation journey, IBM can help. We are continuing to build a coalition of ecosystems to help enterprises gain the flexibility to scale with hybrid cloud in a security-rich environment and achieve their #1 mission—create exceptional customer experiences that lead to business success and growth.

IBM has commissioned a report—”Central Banking and Cloud Services: The New Frontier,” produced by the team at the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF)—to provide a better understanding of how financial institutions compare to private sector organizations in how they think about cloud and approach their cloud migration strategy.