In heavily regulated industries like financial services, security, risk and compliance teams are regularly concerned about ensuring compliance with the constantly evolving security requirements and regulatory landscape. This concern gets heightened (and rightfully so) as they embark on their cloud transformation journeys. They expect digital partners—including fintechs/SaaS providers and cloud service providers—to deliver a robust control environment that enables them to meet their compliance requirements.
IBM Cloud for Financial Services® is a first-of-its-kind cloud designed by the financial services industry to help clients as they strive to mitigate risk and accelerate cloud adoption. Central to our cloud is the IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services, which provides a structured, “build once, use many” approach for meeting multiple industry standards and regulatory requirements.
The IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services provides a comprehensive security and compliance structure for the entire ecosystem through a common set of automated, preconfigured controls that are applied across IBM Cloud services, Multi-Zone Regions (MZRs), third-party applications (SaaS) and financial institution workloads. In addition, the IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center enables clients and SaaS providers to continuously monitor their environment and enforce security and compliance postures. The result is a secured environment engineered to help clients simplify compliance management, lower the risk and cost of moving sensitive data to the cloud, modernize workloads and rapidly integrate the capabilities needed to move their business forward.
The IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services continually evolves through collaboration with industry experts, helping clients automate and monitor their security and compliance posture. IBM has partnered with the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA)—a global not-for-profit dedicated to defining standards, certifications and best practices to help ensure secured cloud computing—to further advance security and risk management in the cloud across financial services. This joint effort aims to align and harmonize the two respective cloud control frameworks (i.e., the IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services and the CSA Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM)), with a focus on helping the financial services sector meet the ever-evolving security and compliance requirements across their cloud environments.
The results of this joint effort show that 96% of the controls from the IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services align with the CSA CCM. Organizations that have adopted the CSA CCM can now use IBM Cloud Services and/or transact with SaaS providers on IBM Cloud for Financial Services with confidence, knowing that compliance to CSA’s CCM has become that much easier given the high level of control alignment. The detailed results of this collaboration can be viewed on the CSA website: CSA CCM v4.0 Addendum – IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services v1.1.0 (link resides outside of ibm.com).
To learn more about how IBM is creating a new standard for secure and compliance-centric cloud computing, please visit the IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services webpage.