Maintain security, compliance, and control of VMware regulated workloads in the world’s first public cloud for financial services.

Financial institutions and regulated industries undergoing digital transformation and hybrid cloud adoption face the unique challenges of protecting an ever-increasing attack surface and maintaining compliance with industry and regulatory requirements. To protect their businesses, enterprises need continuous visibility into workloads and must maintain a “full-stack” understanding of their workload vulnerabilities and configuration issues at the infrastructure, platform, and application level.

In November 2019, IBM announced it had designed a public cloud for financial services built on IBM Cloud. IBM Cloud for Financial Services is the only public cloud platform with the framework in place to support regulatory workloads with automated security and industry-leading encryption services.

A secure, automated solution for financial services VMware customers

IBM Cloud for VMware Regulated Workloads is part of the IBM Cloud for Financial Services solution set and utilizes its policy framework, which deploys a shared-responsibility model for implementing controls. It is designed to enable financial institutions and their ecosystem partners to confidently host apps and workloads in the cloud and be able to demonstrate regulatory compliance significantly faster and more efficiently than they are today. In fact, the policy framework is designed to demonstrate regulatory compliance on an ongoing basis, rather than every few months.

With IBM Cloud for VMware Regulated Workloads, clients can do the following:

• More-effectively implement and govern security controls in the cloud.
• Ensure auditing of all cloud administration.
• Help protect business critical data assets.
• Prioritize meeting IT compliance for various national or industrial entities.

Enhancing VMware vCenter Server on IBM Cloud for regulated workloads

IBM Cloud for VMware Regulated Workloads is a secure, automated reference architecture that enhances VMware vCenter Server on IBM Cloud to deliver a security-rich, high-performance platform for VMware workloads in regulated industries.

The reference architecture is a prescriptive solution and is comprised of three dedicated and isolated, purpose-built layers with a set of services included in the management plane. IBM Cloud for VMware Regulated Workloads is ideal for regulated industries, inclusive of banking and financial services. This solution is available in nearly 35 global data centers and has additional add-on services available, like Veeam and Zerto services for business continuity and disaster recovery.

Key attributes of IBM Cloud for VMware Regulated Workloads

Isolation

• Separate management control and monitoring plane
• Separate edge cluster and gateway management with isolation from public internet
• Network management to isolate software-defined networking (SDN) control plane from workload clusters

Access restrictions

• Identity and access management (IAM)
• Role-based administration and user access

Policies

• Unified security and network policies across management stack and workload clusters for both virtual machines (VMs) and containers

Encryption

• Integrated key control with granular encryption
• Key management options like bring your own key (BYOK) and keep your own key (KYOK) encryption services
• Highest level encryption key protection with FIPS 140-2 Level 4

Compliance

• Continuous compliance management auditing
• Monitoring and prevention

Backup and disaster recovery

• Data and virtual machine backup
• Disaster recovery and high availability clusters (optional)

Management

• Two management options to fit business needs
• Fully customer-managed, single-tenant option with root hypervisor access control
• IBM-managed, multi-tenant option with IBM managing the hypervisor

Get started

As clients continue to migrate and modernize their VMware workloads on IBM Cloud, especially regulated and mission critical business workloads, security of these assets is of utmost priority.

Find out more about IBM Cloud for VMware Regulated Workloads and check out how to get started.