New technologies enable customers to ‘build anything, deploy everywhere’.
Open source vendor, Red Hat Malaysia announced several new products to help in the rise of customers’ workload demands, due to COVID-19.
During a press conference attended by CIO Tech Asia, Red Hat showed how its new offerings were developed to help organisations of all sizes and industries optimise, scale, and protect IT operations in the face of shifting global dynamics.
Red Hat announced:
- OpenShift virtualisation: A technology preview within Red Hat OpenShift, derived from the KubeVirt open source project. It enables organisations to develop, deploy and manage applications consisting of virtual machines alongside containers and server-less, all in one modern platform that unifies cloud-native and traditional workloads. Red Hat brings traditional application stacks forward into a layer of open innovation, enabling customers to truly transform at their speed, not at the whims of proprietary lock-in.
- Red Hat OpenShift 4.4: The latest version of Kubernetes platform, which builds on the simplicity and scale of Kubernetes Operators. Rebased on Kubernetes 1.17, OpenShift 4.4 introduces a developer-centric view of platform metrics and monitoring for application workloads; monitoring integration for Red Hat Operators; cost management for assessing the resources and costs used for specific applications across the hybrid cloud; and much more.
- Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes: Provides a single, simplified control point for the monitoring and deployment of OpenShift clusters at scale, offering policy-driven governance and application life cycle management.
The vendor has also made available Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2, one of the latest version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform. The platform helps address the IT challenges presented by shifting global dynamics, Red Hat believes that the operating system should do more than “just work;” it should help stabilise operations today with the capacity to support and embrace innovation later.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 is built for the interconnected nature of the hybrid cloud era, is designed to offer these capabilities and more, extending beyond the reliability, stability, and production-readiness for which the platform is known.
The latest additions to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 platform includes:
- Management and monitoring capabilities via updates to Red Hat Insights
- Enhanced container tools
- A smoother user experience for Linux experts and newcomers alike
The event was also attended by Choong Lee Chen, head of Lifestyle Banking of Alliance Bank Malaysia who discussed work with Red Hat on an open architecture container platform using agile methodology. This helped the bank simplify banking services, increase security, and standardise processes.
Alliance Bank Malaysia Berhad and its subsidiaries, Alliance Investment Bank Berhad and Alliance Islamic Bank Berhad, is an integrated financial services group. The Group offers banking and financial solutions through its consumer banking, small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) banking, corporate and commercial banking, Islamic banking, investment banking, and stockbroking businesses.
“We have strengthened our digital capabilities and enhanced our systems, controls, and security features, as well as improved customer engagement,” said Chen.
Working with Red Hat Consulting, Alliance Bank used a microservices-based architecture to create a large project, instead of multiple individual projects, on a dedicated set of hardware.
To support its agile strategy, Alliance Bank chose an open container platform to allow collaboration across teams. The platform allowed the bank to put all branch products and services on a tablet for its staff to use with customers.
Another innovation was the bank’s branch-in-a-tablet solution, which lets individuals open a savings account and activate their debit card, internet, and mobile banking in about 15 minutes using a tablet. Enterprise clients can open a business account digitally in a day, in one visit only. This program is part of the bank’s overall strategy to use technology to streamline operations for greater efficiency.
Alliance Bank is now able to innovate and scale its digital innovations quickly to meet the needs of its customers. The branch-in-tablet project reduced account opening time by 70 per cent and increased the availability of staff to customers by 75 per cent.
Project delivery takes up to six months with agile practices, instead of up to 18 months with the previous waterfall method.
“Alliance Bank has developed a culture of agile collaboration and rapid innovation,” said Chen. “By removing redundant processes that require physical space, Alliance Bank has improved the customer experience with new community spaces in their branches while also reducing operating costs.”
