The financial services industry is evolving with a new competitive landscape driving changes in firms’ IT and technology needs. But there are still IT platforms that provide the infrastructure to process the mission-critical workloads and transactions for most of the largest institutions globally. As institutions are increasingly deploying selected workloads into a cloud environment, including traditional on-premise, private cloud, and public cloud, they struggle with how this mission critical infrastructure fits into these new environments.Although there are advantages cloud can offer, many applications have not been deployed in the cloud for reasons like vendor lock-in and security concerns, among other things.

Many institutions are looking at how to best leverage mainframe applications and data to advance long-term strategic planning. The mainframe will continue to be an asset within large tier 1 institutions, no matter the transformation strategy.In this environment, it is crucial to optimize all existing infrastructure.

The release of the IBM z15 is positioned as the company’s answer to the age of cloud computing, evolving to meet the needs of hybrid cloud deployments, leveraging investment in data and applications, and adding features and functionality to complement this strategy. IBM sees z15 as having tools and capabilities needed to modernize towards the cloud and protect enterprise applications and data.