IBM is rolling out new enhancements to its emerging public cloud that take direct aim at developers, who are a key focus of mainstream competitors like Amazon Web Services. The highlight of the launch is a dedicated platform-as-a-service option that allows security-conscious organizations to physically isolate their projects from the workloads of other customers.

The new single-tenant version of Bluemix, a souped-up implementation of the Cloud Foundry project that Big Blue launched in June, returns the spotlight to applications after several months in which the companies has occupied itself with high-profile alliances and mass-market services. It provides an environment for developers to take advantage of flexibility that comes with the freedom to provision resources as needed even when handling workloads that have traditionally been kept within the four walls of the organization.

To make it easier to pull that data from behind the firewall into IBM’s cloud, Bluemix Dedicated provides an extensive collection of interfaces that are intended to reduce the amount of manual work required to establish a secure connection with on-premise systems. Yet the main benefit of the catalog is not that it frees up developers from having to lay down the scaffolding themselves – although that’s certainly a major advantage – but that it eliminates the need for organizations to keep sensitive data in the cloud.

Instead, applications can use the interfaces to request information as needed from a company’s back-end infrastructure. That functionality comes in addition to new Bluemix automation capabilities and a number of other services. The list includes the hosted document store Big Blue obtained through the acquisition of Cloudant Inc. earlier this year, the data integration technology it gained as part of the Aspera Inc. deal a few months prior and cognitive computing and social media analytics capabilities of the Watson question answering computer.

That addresses the development phase of the application lifecycle. To help organizations move their software into production, Big Blue is complementing Bluemix Dedicated with a new catalog of services aimed at paving a road to the adoption of DevOps practices that can help increase cooperation among software engineers and operations professionals. The portfolio bundles workflow management, testing and monitoring capabilities with IBM’s consultancy know-how to take some of the hassle out of building and running applications in the public cloud.