Red Hat’s automation for financial services

Red Hat Malaysia recently talked about their automation portfolio, and have suggested that it can help with regulation compliance especially in the financial services industry.  Eric Quah, Country Manager for Red Hat Malaysia & Brunei, explains further about this.

EITN: At a previous online briefing, Red Hat had shared how there were many use cases for automation in banks, especially when it comes to mundane process and complying to regulations. Can you share more detailed examples of this?

Eric: Enterprise automation is key to modernising workflow – by improving speed, efficiency, and productivity. We’ve seen greater consistency, increased productivity and cost-management with use cases from our customers across various industries.

For FSIs, by 2022, 75% of Tier-1 APAC banks and insurance companies will deploy intelligent automation solutions at scale for increased automation, intelligent decision making, and improved operational efficiencies to achieve exceptional business value and deliver a more real-time and contextual customer experience. One example of this would be one of Red Hat’s customers, Ascend Money in Thailand and Indonesia. To solve growing complexity from acquisitions and operations across six countries, financial technology company Ascend Money sought to build a central application development and deployment platform. By standardizing on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, the company made its application delivery and processes more efficient. Ascend Money can now more easily expand business products and services to quickly meet customer demand.

Similarly, we recognised SOCSO’s success in digitization and automation at Red Hat APAC’s 2020 Innovation Awards, in the Digital Transformation category. On top of transforming its services and modernising its systems, SOCSO turned to automation to build business processes and workflows through Red Hat Process Automation Manager and deployed Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Red Hat JBoss Web Server.

Doing so helped them reduce operational costs while extending the availability of its services and reaching more stakeholders. Through automation, 400,000 employers can now perform transactions such as contribution submissions and payments via SOCSO’s new digital channels instead of having to visit a physical branch.

Additionally, they are now able to accommodate more stakeholders to ensure self-employees, such as e-hailing drivers, are protected under PERKESO.

EITN: What is the role that automation plays in helping FSI adhere to RMIT policy set by Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM)?

Eric: Automation equips FSI players with the technology and means to fuel innovation, reduce costs, and more importantly, mitigate risks. As financial institutions manage complex, sensitive financial and customer data, automation can help meet compliance and enforcements aligned to the RMiT policy.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, delivers automated systems and application patch management, configuration management, and change management across distributed IT environments, with enterprise-level analytics. Compatibility with the National Institute of Standards and Technology-certified OpenSCAP allows automation of regulatory compliance processes across distributed systems and within containers. Automation ultimately helps with:

• Building confidence and trust:One of the principal goals of a successful automation implementation is to minimize manual input, which formerly created the possibility to introduce variation and errors. The standardization of processes that it inherently enables boosts confidence in accuracy, repeatability, and degree of quality control while promoting a high degree of efficiency.
• Achieving visibility and control:Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform allows organizations to democratize IT and allows standardized processes to be completed faster, more broadly, and with a clear audit trail, retaining evidence that the FSI organization has carried out what is required under local and international legislation.
• Retaining Talent:There are capital and human costs when performing security and compliance tasks manually, including the added risks of variation, errors and rework loss of trust, and technical debt.

As banks compete to attract and retain digital talent, enterprise automation reduces time spent on repetitive, but critical, security tasks, while helping staff carry out repetitive tasks to the same, or higher levels of accuracy and quality, with a high degree of auditability.  Organisations can use automation to help reduce tedium and support retention of talented staff.

EITN: What about automation for the telco sector?

Eric: In telcos, the most automated infrastructure management tasks include security, network automation, and system/security updates.

Singtel deployed Red Hat Ansible Automation to address the rise of active mobile consumers and digital businesses in Asia Pacific which has driven demand for reliable and fast internet connectivity.

With Red Hat Ansible Automation, Singtel can use playbooks for configuration management and to automate time-consuming, repetitive tasks such as diagnostics and report generation. This not only helps ensure better stability and network uptime, but also frees up employees from routine work to focus on revenue-generating tasks.

 EITN: Especially when it comes to building of hybrid clouds. Correct me if I am wrong, Red Hat has solutions for private cloud deployment and management. IBM has public cloud for enterprises? How does Red Hat work with IBM to provide hybrid cloud, if at all? What is the role that automation can play here?

 Eric: As organisations examine their options for the cloud, many are selecting a hybrid cloud architecture. This decision is typically made as there are advantages that both the private and public cloud bring to the table. But as the adoption of hybrid cloud increases, organizations are also discovering the complexities that come along with that decision due to the need to manage both private and public clouds as a cohesive entity.

In order to achieve the benefits of a hybrid, organisations must be able to quickly scale infrastructure resources, address the governance of both private and public clouds, manage where application workloads are placed and be prepared to move workloads between private and public as needed. Organizations should also provide a configuration management solution that works in both clouds to ensure consistency, and develop and execute IT process runbooks for both clouds so that there is commonality of support across both clouds.

Red Hat is also the leader in Kubernetes, from cloud-native infrastructure to the edge to the developer services running on top of these platforms. Powered by OpenShift, Red Hat is driving hybrid cloud ubiquity with IBM – keeping in line with Red Hat’s commitment to customer choice, the partnership supports a broader range of architectures, including IBM POWER, IBM Z, IBM LinuxONE and with support for IBM Storage. More than just being available on public clouds, Red Hat OpenShift is also offered as a managed service across these footprints, removing many of the infrastructure headaches associated with managing and maintaining cloud-native platforms.

EITN: What is the roadmap for your automation portfolio for the next 2 years?

Eric: It is hard to predict the future, but the technologies and use cases surrounding business automation continue to evolve, driven by macro-level trends such as the intersection between automation and application intelligence.

We are also seeing the rise of citizen developers, and how open source advocates can bring this knowledge to automate the enterprise.

We may also see the impact of new cloud-native development and deployment with microservices and containers, and more. One exciting example where we see this taking shape is the open source TrustyAI project, which combines machine learning models and decision logic to deliver more clarity, and trust, in automated decisioning and predictive analytics systems.

As the largest open source company in the world, Red Hat believes that using an open development model helps create more stable, secure, and innovative technologies. We’ve spent more than two decades collaborating on community projects and protecting open source licenses so we can continue to develop software that pushes the boundaries of technological ability. Cross-sector and cross-vertical collaboration will only accelerate in the coming years, in order to jointly solve problems.