French multinational bank BNP Paribas has signed a ten-year agreement with IBM Cloud, expanding its use of the latter's cloud computing offering.
The two companies have worked together since 2019, with BNP hosting IBM Cloud hardware in its data centers. The company will now build on that existing infrastructure by dedicating a new area in its data centers to IBM Cloud, planned for completion in 2028.
BNP is a customer of atNorth's data centers, with DCD reporting in 2023 that the company was hosted out of data centers in Sweden and Iceland. The Swedish data center is being used for data-intensive applications and high-performance computing.
According to a previous job listing, BNP has at least one data center in India.
The move to create a separate area for IBM Cloud hardware is in part planned to meet the requirements of the European DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) regulation.
DORA came into force for financial institutions on January 16, 2023, which had two years to comply. The regulations associated with DORA relate to the management of risk and resilience of ICT systems, including those provided by third-party companies such as data centers and cloud computing provider.
The creation of new cloud infrastructure and careful management are expected to help BNP Paribas maintain business continuity and to protect customer data.
BNP will also be able to use GPUs on IBM Cloud integrated with BNP Paribas’ cloud infrastructure, enabling the bank to experiment and deploy generative AI use cases.
“We continuously invest in cutting-edge technologies to strengthen the resilience of our infrastructures and drive innovation for our clients, employees, and partners," said Marc Camus, CIO of BNP Paribas.
"By combining GPU-as-a-service, a dedicated, state-of-the-art environment within our data centers, and a cloud-native infrastructure, we are strengthening our technological foundation, as well as the security and the compliance of our information systems."
Alan Peacock, general manager of IBM Cloud, added: "This latest milestone in our partnership will provide expanded enterprise-grade Cloud services across the entire bank to unlock new possibilities with AI and cloud innovation not only for BNP Paribas, but for enterprises around the world.”
BNP Paribas operates in 64 countries and offers commercial, personal, investment and institutional banking services.
The company announced at the end of 2024 that it would be deploying Oracle's Exadata Cloud@Customer offering for its on-premises databases. It hopes that the solution will enable it to have better access to Oracle's automation features and reduce latency between applications and data, while retaining control of data hosted in BNP's data centers.
