Frank Attaie
Vice President of Cloud, IBM Canada
One industry leveraging the huge potential value-add of IBM’s hybrid cloud is the financial services sector. Here, hybrid cloud is of particular value because of the strong need to digitally enable their business outcomes and to deliver them in a scalable, secure, and reliable manner.
“Because the financial services industry is highly regulated, we’ve taken our IBM public cloud and leveraged our new Multi-Zone Region (MZR) data centres in Canada to solve for a lot of the regulatory challenges. These include data residency, privacy and security concerns, and compliance with the public regulators,” says Frank Attaie, Vice President of Cloud at IBM Canada.
IBM is expanding its global cloud footprint with a new MZR in Canada. This investment brings three new data centres within 10 km of each other and delivers continuous availability for clients in highly-regulated industries. Situated in Toronto, this architecture results in higher availability, better resiliency, and higher interconnected speeds between data centres to support mission-critical applications. “We’re meeting our clients where they want to go,” says Attaie. “On top of that, we’re giving them a very flexible and balanced hybrid cloud approach available in Canada.”
By taking its best-of-breed public cloud and building hundreds of controls that address issues faced by banks, credit unions, and other institutions in the financial services ecosystem, IBM is revolutionizing how secure and trusted financial services are offered in a public cloud platform.
“As businesses adjust their technology roadmap, the need to deliver a frictionless experience is top of mind for many executives,” says Attaie. “Whether you’re a large bank or a growing fintech, IBM Cloud for Financial Services can deliver high levels of security and control for your data in a flexible, hybrid cloud environment.”
Whether you’re a large bank or a growing fintech, IBM Cloud for Financial Services can deliver high levels of security and control for your data in a flexible, hybrid cloud environment.
Frank Attaie, IBM Canada
A one-of-a-kind approach
Attaie underscores that IBM is truly providing a unique, cutting-edge service via its hybrid cloud ecosystem. “We’re the only company that can provide a flexible experience that leverages a single platform,” he says. “We alone can provide a ‘build once, deploy anywhere’ service. With IBM leveraging Red Hat OpenShift, we’re the only technology company where cloudification of the workload transcends multiple platforms. What we do saves companies a ton of time and money and allows them to proliferate the technology on a scale they just can’t do with anyone else.”
Attaie notes that it’s vital for financial companies to avoid finding themselves in a position where they don’t have the flexibility to evolve with market fluctuations by only having access to one cloud strategy. “You don’t want to be stuck on proprietary platforms or you’ll fall behind,” he says. “Our hybrid cloud is truly a cloud for everyone. It democratizes the cloud platform.”
