Capitalizing in Today’s Hybrid, Multicloud Era

As we close out the year, I’m taking the time to reflect on all that we have accomplished in 2022. We’re also having a lot of conversations as a team around strategy to ensure alignment. What businesses need to realize is that migrating to cloud is not a strategy, it’s the tool to help you execute your strategy. It's like saying, when I paint my house, my strategy is a paintbrush. The paintbrush is just the tool to achieve the color you want.?

All too often organizations focus on perfecting technical architectures at the expense of what should be the more important consideration, delivering maximum business value. This approach often leads to the creation of a Frankencloud, an environment that’s so complex with disconnected piece parts, it’s difficult to navigate and can be nearly impossible to secure. IBM’s strategy is to bring order to the complexity through our holistic approach to securing hybrid multicloud. The IBM Cloud platform is built to deliver business value through digital transformation and extreme focus on resiliency, performance, sustainability, security, compliance and cost.

In 2019, we took a strategic step addressing the needs of our clients in regulatory industries – introducing a new category to the market launching the first industry-specific cloud for the financial services industry. IBM Cloud for Financial Services was a significant pivot from commoditized and general-purpose clouds. It is specifically designed for highly regulated workloads, and by meeting the highest set of standards for financial services institutions, it can also be leveraged across other industries –healthcare, airlines, telco, retail, and more.?

We thought long and hard about how to differentiate ourselves from the traditional hyperscaler, which only sells commoditized infrastructure as a service. We have built the laws, rules and regulations that regulated industries need directly into our cloud platform, while other cloud providers require the customer, at their own expense, to build and maintain these controls.?

In short, we’re uniquely focused on mitigating risk with the highest set of regulatory and compliance standards. This enables us to help clients transform business processes in the mid-and bank-office that cannot be fulfilled by general-purpose cloud. Our industry expertise helps enterprises to manage workloads and accelerate change against the particular business, data and compliance needs of their segment.?

As we look ahead at 2023, compliance will be top of mind for business leaders. With regulatory requirements like DORA?continuing to heat up across the globe, we will continue to leverage the learnings of the IBM Financial Services Cloud Council, which has been instrumental in bringing major financial institutions together to help drive the strategic evolution of cloud security in this highly regulated sector. This council started with just eight members has now grown to almost 130 members from nearly 80 financial institutions.?

We will also help our clients to understand that cloud is not simply a destination, but a way to improve their business outcomes. Our strategy will continue to help our clients create value through cost savings, speed to market, business enablement and improved service levels.

In today’s hybrid, multicloud era, we are committed to working with our clients to prepare for today and tomorrow. This includes delivering the most secure, stable and performance-driven cloud, while ensuring our clients are not locked out of innovation. We are doing this while prioritizing security and compliance to ensure our clients maintain the trust of their customers.??

Thank you to all our clients, partners and employees who have been part of this journey for the past two plus years – I am grateful for all we have accomplished together.??It has been a wild and exciting ride as we tackle some of the biggest issues of our times - security, compliance and regulation - while also accelerating the rate and pace in which we innovate.?????