5 things you need to know: Driving innovation with AI and hybrid cloud this year

Looking ahead to 2024, businesses around the world are undoubtedly assessing their progress and planning for future growth. The rise of generative AI, evolving regulations and data sovereignty laws, and ongoing security challenges must be top of mind for organizations of all types, especially those in highly regulated industries such as financial services, government, healthcare, and telecommunications.

As enterprises seek to address these requirements and achieve growth while adopting innovative AI and hybrid cloud technologies, IBM helps customers make workload placement decisions based on elasticity, performance, security, compliance and cost. We will continue to meet our customers no matter where they are in their journey.

Here are five things you need to know about how IBM Cloud helps customers balance changing regulations and innovation.

1. Addressing regulatory requirements and advancing data sovereignty laws

As countries enact laws designed to protect data, IBM is focused on helping clients drive innovation while addressing local needs. For example, IBM Cloud offers a variety of features and services that can help customers address the fundamental principles of a sovereign cloud, including data sovereignty, operational sovereignty, and digital sovereignty.

IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Services provides customers with “keep your own keys” encryption capabilities designed to give customers exclusive control of their keys and help address privacy requirements. With these features, we aim to enable our customers to control who can access their data while leveraging the benefits of the cloud. Additionally, IBM Cloud Satellite is designed to help customers meet their data residency requirements with the ability to run cloud services and applications in any environment where their data resides – on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge.

2. Safely balance data and innovation coming from AI

At the same time, we are helping our customers securely embrace AI to drive business innovation. Earlier this year, we released watsonx running on IBM Cloud to help enterprises train, scale, and deploy AI models while scaling their workloads. IBM and VMware also recently announced that they are combining VMware Cloud Foundation, Red Hat OpenShift, and the IBM watsonx AI and data platform. This combination allows enterprises to access IBM watsonx in a private, on-premises Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environment as well as a hybrid cloud that includes watsonx SaaS offerings on the IBM Cloud. Customers can also optionally use IBM Cloud Satellite to automate and simplify deployment and day 2 operations of VMware Private AI in OpenShift environments.

AI can be a fundamental source of competitive advantage, helping organizations address current and future challenges and uncover opportunities. For example, CrushBank’s AI knowledge management platform leverages watsonx to transform IT support, helping companies streamline help desk operations through AI by providing IT staff with better information. According to CrushBank, this increases productivity and reduces problem resolution times by 45%, ultimately improving customer experience.

We understand that running AI at scale can be a difficult process, especially given the challenges of processing the data required for AI models, and we continue to provide solutions to help our customers leverage AI at speed and scale. We are doing our best to provide. With IBM Cloud Object Storage, we’re helping our customers manage their data files as resilient, durable objects that can help enterprises scale their AI workloads.

3. Manage security and compliance issues across hybrid, multicloud environments

As companies face new threats across their supply chains, including those that may arise from AI, a complex web of global regulations is struggling to keep pace. In our view, an effective cybersecurity strategy across the supply chain requires the adoption of consistent standards, workload and data protection, and governance, supported by robust technology solutions. IBM’s ongoing commitment to providing innovative security solutions that help customers face modern challenges is the foundation of IBM’s recent advancements. This includes the recent expansion of the IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center, a modernized suite of cloud security and compliance solutions that help enterprises mitigate risk and protect data across hybrid, multicloud environments and workloads. The new IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center data security broker solution provides a transparent layer of data encryption with format-preserving encryption and anonymization technologies to protect sensitive data used in business applications and AI workloads.

IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center is also designed to protect hybrid, multicloud environments and workloads by providing enhanced cloud security posture management (CSPM), workload protection (CWPP), and infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM). Workload Protection aims to prioritize vulnerability management to quickly identify and remediate critical vulnerabilities. In fact, we’ve revolutionized our scanning engine to detect vulnerabilities in Kubernetes, OpenShift, and Linux standalone hosts, designed to be more accurate, deliver improved performance, and make it easier to prioritize critical issues.

To complement our existing suite of tools, we have also introduced the AI ​​ICT Guardrails profile to the IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center. It provides a list of predefined infrastructure and associated data controls required to handle AI and generative AI workloads. With these guardrails, we strive to help enterprises seamlessly manage their security and compliance capabilities as they scale their AI workloads.

4. Embrace third and fourth parties while reducing risk.

With a long history of working closely with customers in highly regulated industries, we fundamentally know the challenges they face, and we are building the cloud for regulated industries to enable organizations like financial services, government, healthcare, and more to securely innovate. We support you to move forward. In fact, we are honored to have been recognized by Gartner® in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Strategic Cloud Platform Services (SCPS).¹ We believe IBM’s positioning in this report is a strong recognition of our strategy.

We designed the cloud for regulated industries so that our customers can confidently host their applications and workloads in the cloud while addressing third-party and fourth-party risk across their supply chain. Only ISVs and SaaS providers that have been verified to be aligned with the IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services, an industry-defined security and streamlined compliance control framework, can offer offerings on IBM Cloud for Financial Services.

The framework is informed by IBM’s Financial Services Cloud Council, which brings together CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, and compliance and risk leaders to drive cloud adoption for mission-critical workloads in financial services. The committee has grown to more than 160 members from over 90 financial institutions, including Comerica Bank, Westpac, BNP Paribas and CaixaBank, all working together to provide banks with the controls they need to safely operate their sensitive data in the cloud. These controls are not IBM’s. This is a collective control across the industry and made available across multiple clouds (public or private) through IBM Cloud Satellite.

5. Modernize processes as organizations embrace digital transformation

Across industries, we are seeing organizations further advance in their digital transformation journeys. For example, in financial services, the payment ecosystem is an inflection point of change. We believe this is a time for change, and IBM continues to work with our partner community to drive innovation. Temenos Payments Hub recently became the first dedicated payments solution to offer innovative payment capabilities on IBM Cloud for Financial Services, now the latest initiative in a long history of helping customers transform. The solution is now available across IBM’s hybrid cloud infrastructure running on IBM Power and Red Hat OpenShift with LinuxONE through Temenos Payments Hub on IBM Cloud for Financial Services. And as organizations look to modernize their trade finance journey, we’ve leveraged IBM’s extensive technology and consulting capabilities to develop a platform for the industry. We recently launched the IBM Connected Trade Platform, designed to support the digitization of trade and supply chain finance and help organizations transform from fragmented supply chains to data-driven supply chains.

Learn more about balancing innovation and regulatory requirements with IBM Cloud.

As companies prepare to accelerate innovation in the coming year, it will be important to leverage the latest technologies, including AI and hybrid cloud, while also addressing evolving regulatory requirements. Although regulations will continue to change, IBM is committed to helping customers improve resiliency and performance, address compliance issues, enable security, and manage risk.

Learn more about IBM Cloud

¹ Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services, December 4, 2023. Gartner And the Magic Quadrant Gartner, Inc. and/or are registered trademarks of its U.S. and international affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.