Asian Development Bank and Alliance Bank choose Red Hat platform to better align automation strategies

Red Hat shared that leading banks such as Alliance Bank (Malaysia) and the Asian Development Bank (Philippines) have adopted Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform as its enterprise-grade, agentless automation platform in their journey to the cloud. Both these financial institutions represent examples of early adopters for infrastructure automation technology to support business growth while increasing resiliency and reliability.

Application modernization is among today’s top IT priorities. According to a 2020 Forrester report commissioned by Red Hat, automation is also an organizational necessity; three out of five respondents reported automation as one of their firms’ top initiatives, even amid competing priorities like adoption of cloud, containers and security management.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, together with Red Hat OpenShift, provides a powerful, scalable platform for this transformation. With dynamic global challenges requiring rapid adjustments in operational domains and environments, automation projects help mitigate the complexity that these conditions produce and provide faster responses to changing business requirements.

ADB and Alliance Bank are examples of financial services organizations in Southeast Asia that are deploying Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate repetitive and manual tasks, orchestrate complex workflows, improve processes and offer agility to deploy applications faster with fewer human interventions.

Bringing together teams for improved collaboration, these new services and offerings ultimately connect business managers with automation leaders to better align automation strategies with the needs of the business and expand how automation can be used.

These Southeast Asian banks are using automation to innovate and transform their businesses:

• Asian Development Bank, Philippines: Asian Development Bank (ADB) was looking into automation solutions that would improve operational efficiency and effectiveness by automating repetitive tasks. ADB uses a hybrid environment with workloads running on-prem virtualization platforms. They wanted to focus on the consistency of automation of on-premise, extending to the public cloud. The ease of integration offered by open source technology, combined with Red Hat’s procedures for developing code in a hybrid environment, was well-suited for ADB as they look to use cloud as their primary source of infrastructure.
• Alliance Bank, Malaysia: Alliance Bank wanted to automate manual tasks such as server configuration, patching and hardening in order to free up team bandwidth away from resource-heavy tasks. Starting with server hardening and patching, Alliance Bank then added disaster recovery (DR) automation to protect their core systems and build readiness as their hybrid cloud environment expanded. Red Hat automated the DR process and created a playbook to make this process repeatable and scalable. This is resulting in better uptime of Alliance Bank’s applications when they run DR processes. The efficiency and speed offered by process automation also means the IT team can spend more time focusing on better customer experience and continued innovation.

“2021 has demonstrated that organizations need to accelerate, rather than pause, their digital transformation efforts. A key part of this journey should be network automation, which allows users to manage policy, enforcement and processes at the domain level. Several financial organizations in ASEAN are deploying Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate applications and IT infrastructure, while providing a simple language to help facilitate DevOps practices. Automation allows organizations to architect intelligently with their existing infrastructure, while bringing legacy IT toward a cloud-native future,” said Josep Garcia, vice president and general manager for growth and emerging markets, Red Hat.

“As Alliance Bank competes in a fast-moving and dynamic financial services marketplace, automation increasingly becomes an essential component of our cloud infrastructure. Red Hat OpenShift includes built-in automation capabilities that help our teams focus on creating and updating valuable services. By expanding our automation capabilities, we can free up our resources to implement new processes and applications and to upscale. This supports our overarching goal of delivering banking the Alliance Way: to be more empathetic to customers’ needs and deliver innovative digital solutions that are fast, simple, and responsive,” said Ken Yong, Head, group transformation office, Alliance Bank Malaysia Berhad.

“ADB was looking into technological solutions to improve operations efficiency and effectiveness by automating repetitive tasks. As we use both public and private clouds, we needed a solution that would allow us to provision our infrastructure like a tap – turn it on, higher, or off as needed. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform allows us to build secure infrastructure that’s supported with automation. Ansible also gives us a common language, documentation and developer toolset to make the process more efficient. Now, Ansible is our common language for orchestration in CI/CD for infrastructure as code. This ultimately frees up bandwidth for our people to innovate, and better focus on serving ADB’s members and partners in order to promote social and economic development,” said Krista Lozada, senior IT specialist (innovation & engineering), Asian Development Bank.