Computer Weekly reports that the IBM Cloud for Financial Services public cloud environment has been released for general availability. Specially designed to address the regulatory and technological needs of organizations in the financial services sector, and developed in collaboration with the Bank of America, Luminor Bank, MUFG and other financial groups, the new cloud environment is expected to “help reduce the risk for financial institutions, their partners and fintechs, and innovate quickly with built-in controls that are adhered to by the entire ecosystem,” IBM said in its release. “With a focus on data security delivered with IBM’s confidential computing and sophisticated encryption capabilities, we aim to reduce risk in the supply chain for banks, insurers and other financial services industry players,” said Howard Boville, head of the company’s IBM Hybrid Cloud Platform. The company recommends that users of the IBM Cloud for Financial Service platform to use it for hosting their VMware-based virtual machine workloads as well as create new, cloud-native applications using Red Hat Openshift.