IBM has signed a deal with Shanghai Wind Information, a Chinese financial service provider, under which it will help bolster latter’s security by employing cloud-based risk analysis by using publicly available information.
The deal that is said to fully comply with Chinese law has been dubbed as an ‘innovative deployment model’ under which the Chinese firm will provide data to IBM without disclosing “specific portfolio holdings or having to install IBM software or hardware on its servers” said IBM’s director of risk analytics Andrew Aziz.
The IBM-Shanghai Wind Information deal highlights the turbulent times when China is increasingly being skeptical about foreign technology companies including the likes of Kaspersky, Apple, Symantec among others.
The reason for this stance is Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA’s capabilities of spying on communications channels and backdoor access to software and hardware manufactured by US companies.
IBM has been one of the major targets of Chinese government because of the fact that most of the server infrastructure in commercial and government organisations in China is powered by IBM. The Chinese government even went to the extent of asking enterprises including banks to find alternatives of IBM servers and abandon IBM servers as soon as possible.
Just yesterday China reportedly banned 10 Apple products from its government procurement list including Pad, iPad Mini, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. The omissions from the procurement list are believed to be attributed to security concerns.
[Source: Reuters]
