Putting silver linings into cloud

Creating industry-specific platforms has enabled companies to move more rapidly to virtual computing.

A bank of servers inside the IBM Cloud in Dallas, Texas. Picture: Connie Zhou

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One of the great benefits of cloud computing has been its ability to provide an affordable and scalable platform on which organisations can build pretty much any computing service they can imagine.

But in seeking to appeal to the broadest possible audience, many cloud providers have had to forgo the attention to specific requirements that some industries demand.

This is especially true for regulated industries such as the financial services sector, where participants can be subject to complicated compliance regimes in the different jurisdictions they operate in around the world.

According to IBM Cloud global vice president and chief technology officer, Hillery Hunter, this can make the migration of computing workloads into a generic cloud environment a difficult or even impossible proposition.

IBM’s solution to this problem has been to work in close partnership with lead customers to create specific cloud platforms which are tailored to the needs of industries.

“There has been a tremendous amount of enthusiasm in the initial layers of adoption of cloud,” Hunter says. “But what is emerging across enterprises is a view that there are particular challenges and opportunities that an industry-specific view of the world can help tackle most efficiently for moving workloads to the cloud.”

As a result of this feedback IBM has been creating cloud solutions that are tailored to the needs of industries from the ground up, based on specific technologies and architectures and including additional tools and services that support those requirements.

Hunter says IBM’s commitment to creating the best possible cloud environment goes all the way down to the transistors used in the processors the cloud runs on.

“Some industries do require in the core technology of the cloud that there be different considerations,” Hunter says. “At that level we can design things to be very robust and have high standards for cryptography to make sure that data is really, really secure.”

Hunter says the interest in industry-specific cloud solutions is prominent in financial services, but is also growing in other industries, including manufacturing and telecommunications.

“Different industries have different objectives and there are hot topics that are key competitive topics for them,” Hunter says.

“It is that constant pressure to change and modernise and improve experiences that is driving what people want to get when they move to cloud.

“In financial services it may mean being able to have a lot of elasticity in the way consumers interact digitally. In telecommunications, it may be addressing shifts and new opportunities because of 5G. Therefore, (we ask) what are the core cloud technologies and services, and what do we need to build, to address those needs specific to that industry, and which vendors need to be in the cloud to enable enterprises from those industries to be effective on cloud.”

Hunter says research has shown that using the right mix of technologies, cloud architectures and services that are tailored to the needs of an industry can deliver up to 2.5 times the value in total cost of ownership over a regular solution.

‘Automation is used to ensure ... that what people are doing on the platform is valid and doesn’t introduce new security risks’

— Hillery Hunter, global vice president and CTO, IBM Cloud

One key technology within the mix is edge cloud services, which bring computation and data storage closer to where the data is generated and are often now being linked back to central cloud services using 5G connections.

Hunter says this technology has proven especially interesting to the manufacturing sector, where the huge amounts of data that their systems generate mean processing it on-site delivers better cost efficiencies.

“There are definitely industry specific lenses on ‘edge’, and on our industry cloud portfolio,” Hunter says. “We have specific approaches around everything from inventory management to visual inspection, delivered in a cloud computing context.”

But for many companies in regulated industries, it is the specific focus on compliance and security requirements which has made industry-specific cloud solutions appealing. One example is IBM’s Cloud for VMware Regulated Workloads, which uses automation technology to ensure organisations can stay compliant with regulations as they make changes within their cloud operating environment.

“Automation is used to ensure that compliance is up to snuff and remains that way, and to ensure that what people are doing on the platform is valid and doesn’t introduce new security risks,” Hunter explains.

Solutions such as this are only made possible through extensive work undertaken to understand how regulated controls map to processes within the cloud platform itself.

“When we do an industry-specific cloud, we bring together the pieces that are needed for security and compliance for that industry,” Hunter says.

“Clients from that industry then know that they can quickly adopt IBM Cloud and put a wide variety of workloads, including mission critical and core applications, to the cloud, because there will be the right security and compliance and regulatory approach there.”

When creating industry-specific cloud solutions, IBM calls upon the depth of experience within its own product and consulting groups and works closely with key clients to co-create solutions that are tailored to their evolving needs.

“Our anchor clients are incredibly important to us, from (oilfield services provider) Schlumberger, which is partnering with us to create a new data platform for the oil and gas industry, to Bank of America and BNP Paribas and others that are working with us to create industry specific cloud for financial services,” Hunter says.

“Those anchor partnerships bring an additional lens and the expertise of people that are living and breathing that industry every day.”

This approach also means that much smaller organisations and startups that choose to build on an IBM industry-specific cloud platform can benefit from the significant experience that these services already contain.

“Knowing that a program has been co-designed and worked through with larger parties in the industry means knowing it has been designed to a high standard and therefore will add added value in security and compliance for entities that are a bit smaller,” Hunter says.

“It is a conversation about scale, automation, depth of design, and depth of security and compliance. We set a very high bar, but that then makes these capabilities that much more attractive for others.”

Ultimately, Hunter believes this approach will help to accelerate the uptake of cloud adoption in some industries. Hunter says this pressure to transform has intensified in the past six months, as organisations and their clients have had to rely more on digital transactions.

“The general tone is very much one of urgency at this point, and that industry-specific lens compresses the time to adoption and enables companies to move more aggressively with a ‘move to cloud’ agenda,” Hunter says.

“And helping industries do that in a way that is specific to their industry and their specific new applications and workloads is needed.”

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