Red Hat, a leading provider of open-source solutions, has said that Riyad Bank, a top Saudi bank, has implemented a hybrid cloud strategy built on Red Hat’s portfolio of open hybrid cloud technologies, including Red Hat OpenShift. 

 

With this the bank eyes greater scalability and speed to market through cloud-native adoption and digital transformation.

 

Red Hat’s open innovation is a keystone of the bank’s drive to speed up innovation and time-to-market of digital services and products. 

 

Financial inclusion

Riyad Bank is on a digital transformation journey aiming to boost its competitiveness in an expanding fintech market as well as contribute to achieving the kingdom's Vision 2030. 

 

To do this, the bank is working to increase financial inclusion and support development, growth and diversification in the banking sector, efforts that are driven in part by emerging IT advancements.

 

Riyad Bank chose to build a flexible platform based on containers and Kubernetes, seeking to improve IT team productivity and better respond to evolving business demands. 

 

The bank wanted a comprehensive, cloud-native solution that encompassed open source code and open standards while also enhancing interoperability with current and future IT investment and limiting the total cost of ownership. 

 

Kubernetes platform

To meet these varied needs, Riyad Bank selected the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform in Red Hat OpenShift for cross-organisational deployment along with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to provide IT automation at scale. 

 

The bank has also enlisted Red Hat Consulting and used Red Hat Learning Subscriptions to establish a framework for repeatable microservices and create a comprehensive training plan. The end goal is to foster a more open organisational culture and up-skill teams in agile methods like DevOps to help generate further efficiencies.

 

To support its cloud infrastructure Riyad Bank is also relying on Red Hat OpenStack Platform as a foundation for its private cloud and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation and Red Hat Ceph Storage for its storage needs.

 

A regional winner

The approach taken and impact achieved by Riyad Bank on its transformation journey led it to be named a regional winner in the Red Hat EMEA Digital Leaders Awards 2021. 

 

Ali Al Shami, country manager, KSA and Bahrain, Red Hat, said: "As fintech innovation fuels the disruption of business models and digitalises customer expectations, Riyad Bank is responding in kind with its comprehensive digital transformation program backed by Red Hat’s open innovation. We’re pleased to work with a team so passionate about making a highly productive and creative contribution to fintech, and look forward to further collaborating with Riyad Bank to establish an agile foundation for its modern apps." 

 

Jamil Barakat, executive vice president, Business Technology Division, Riyad Bank, said “Riyad Bank’s enduring mission to help people, organisations and society achieve their financial aspirations requires us to maximise our flexibility so we can more rapidly amass new capabilities and experiences and lean into change. For this we need to be empowered by world-class technology platforms and a technology partner that understands our goals and pain points – we found this in Red Hat. Our innovation platform based on Red Hat hybrid cloud technologies is helping us fulfill our modernisation strategy and in turn drive development for the financial sector in the kingdom, helping make it a hub for investment and innovation.”-- TradeArabia News Service