IBM brings Bluemix behind the firewall for sensitive workloads

IBM has announced the immediate availability of Bluemix Local its Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment meant to help develop and deploy apps quickly.

Bluemix Local was first announced at the company’s Interconnect conference in February. More recently, Bluemix was part of the Au$450 million deal with ANZ bank.

IBM officially launched its Bluemix Local service, bringing it out of preview.

For most customers, Bluemix has been a cloud only platform but IBM has been testing a locally deployed version called, rather unimaginatively, Bluemix Local.

IBM’s Bluemix development platform was already available on both public and private hosted clouds, but today’s announcement delivers true hybrid cloud app development capabilities, allowing enterprises to build apps in a secure fashion and deploy them across any hybrid environments. Bluemix Local sits behind an enterprise’s firewall and uses the app development backbone found in its Bluemix platform as a service. This is significant for organizations in regulated industries such as banking, healthcare and financial services that must follow strict mandates and internal policies for how security, compliance and sensitive customer data is handled outside of their corporate network. Relay will enable administrators to identify the difference between a private and public service ensuring that only the public services are replicated to the cloud.

Services such as insights from IBM’s Watson supercomputer can be added for reliable predictive analytics.

With a private catalog and API management services, enterprises can also create, publish, manage and monetize their own APIs.

A catalog of more than 100 services that can be used to extend apps and services as well as application programming interfaces. Users also can sync data across geographies using IBM’s global network of cloud data centers that are operated throughout the Americas, Asia, Australia and Europe. This is coupled with a dashboard admin console that gives a single view of on-premise, public and private clouds anywhere in the world.