BNP Paribas expands IBM Cloud partnership to boost resilience

BNP Paribas is expanding its use of IBM Cloud, and has plans to dedicate a new section of its data centres to the platform by 2028.

The move builds on a collaboration that began in 2019 when the bank began hosting IBM Cloud infrastructure on its facilities to support wider digital transformation efforts.

The upcoming investment is designed to add system redundancy and improve resilience in services like payment systems, improve data security, and comply with regulations.

Part of the bank’s strategy is aligned with the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which outlines stricter IT risk management and business continuity requirements for financial institutions. By strengthening its internal cloud infrastructure and maintaining control over cloud service provider risk, BNP Paribas is aiming to meet standards more effectively.

BNP Paribas uses several data centres, including low-emission facilities in Sweden and Iceland operated by atNorth. The locations are used for data-intensive workloads and high-performance computing. A past job listing also indicated that the bank operates at least one data centre in India.

The extension of its partnership with IBM gives BNP Paribas access to GPUs via IBM Cloud, used to test and scale generative AI initiatives. The resources are intended to help business units experiment with new use cases and accelerate the adoption of emerging technologies such as AI.

The bank shifting toward cloud-native development using Red Hat OpenShift, IBM’s Kubernetes-based container platform. By modernising applications through microservices, BNP Paribas aims to increase its agility and support services that can scale across different banking operations – including payment systems.

Marc Camus, chief information officer at BNP Paribas, said the bank is focused on evolving its infrastructure while keeping security and regulatory compliance top of mind. “By combining GPUs as a service, a dedicated, state-of-the-art environment in our data centres, and a cloud-native infrastructure, we are strengthening our technological foundation,” he said.

BNP Paribas also announced plans at the end of 2024 to deploy Oracle’s Exadata Cloud@Customer for on-premises databases, to improve access to automation and reduce latency when processing sensitive data.

(Photo by Unsplash)

See also: IBM wants Nvidia GPUs, and AWS might be the answer

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