How Red Hat and HCLTech help banks get more value out of the cloud sooner

The digital era has significantly changed the way banking firms interact with customers. To meet escalating expectations, they must offer exceptional customer experiences that incorporate capabilities such as mobile and internet access and automated payments. As a result, teams are under pressure to deliver higher quality services to remain competitive and scale the digital business using new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), while adhering to security and compliance regulations.

By taking a cloud-native approach to building applications, banks can take advantage of cloud computing models, DevOps principles and AI advancements to make the delivery of new features and services faster and more flexible.

In addition, by moving to containers and making functions cloud-native, banks can modernize their core banking systems to gain flexibility, agility and better control over operational costs, enabling them to build and deploy their applications or partner with providers. 

Reduce the barriers of migration to modern platforms

Much of the banking industry continues to operate on legacy technology. These systems, while proven, are slow to adjust and can be inflexible. With new applications and service delivery models transforming banking, cloud-native development helps banks adapt. Cloud-native applications provide an opportunity to deliver mobile services, analyze business metrics, assess risk and apply AI and machine learning (ML) to operations. 

Bringing applications to a modern cloud-native platform accelerates development and eases automation, reducing time to market. However, banking organizations often have several concerns when adopting new platforms, including:

• Downtime and data loss: Adopting new architecture and approaches can carry the risk of downtime due to failures and errors from lost or corrupted data.
• Operational complexity: Cloud-native application development and deployment can be more complicated than traditional development operations.
• Lack of availability of third-party software and tools support: Legacy tools may not be certified to run on all container platforms, requiring selecting and getting up to speed with new tools.
• Lack of capability to ensure successful deployment: Running and maintaining a Kubernetes platform is not a trivial task, and many firms do not have the time, resources or experience to successfully implement a containerized environment from disparate technologies.

Many platforms are available, each with different capabilities, features and support. Choosing the right cloud-native development platform helps banks address these concerns and quickly deliver applications without sacrificing quality, reliability or security. 

Red Hat OpenShift brings together tested and trusted services to ease all aspects of developing, modernizing, deploying, running and managing applications. It delivers a complete platform for both traditional and cloud-native applications so that they can run anywhere.

However, according to Red Hat’s The State of Enterprise Open Source report, in-house skills gaps and a lack of resources remain major roadblocks to undertaking this digital transformation.

To address the issue, HCLTech developed the Kubernetes Migration Platform (KMP), which  automates moving legacy container platforms, including IBM Cloud Foundry, VMware Pivotal Cloud Foundry, VMware Tanzu, SUSE Rancher and IBM Bluemix, to OpenShift.

Improve delivery speed and unlock innovation with Red Hat

For banks managing applications across several legacy platforms, there are real financial advantages to moving to OpenShift as quickly as possible, and before legacy platforms contracts come up for renewal.

KMP helps banks accelerate cloud adoption by bringing in workloads from disparate competitive platforms easily, inexpensively and rapidly, reducing set-up time from days to hours and execution times from hours to minutes. As a result, banks can save nearly 400 hours migrating 100 apps to OpenShift, compared with manual processes.

Even if your business uses hybrid, multicloud environments built on different Kubernetes-based platforms, like Google GKE, Microsoft Azure AKS and Amazon EKS, HCLTech’s KMP can easily move workloads between them all.

As well as supporting migrations of any legacy container platform of any size and complexity, KMP:

• Simplifies the migration of containerized microservices and applications to just three clicks.
• Migrates stateless and stateful applications, including containerized databases.
• Minimizes downtime and production outages. 
• Discovers workloads and scans for container vulnerabilities.
• Enables service providers to build and run workloads anywhere consistently.
• Accelerates application modernization and adoption of a cloud-native development approach.

HCLTech’s KMP ensures an easy, fast and reliable migration route to OpenShift, with substantial licensing cost savings. This approach meets banks’ need to modernize infrastructure and applications quickly, preserving the scalability and resiliency of infrastructure and processes. Organizations using Cloud Foundry also have an exit route onto OpenShift via KMP.

Establish cloud-native and AI capabilities faster

Adopting OpenShift allows banks to modernize their applications, improve agility and drive innovation in the rapidly evolving digital banking landscape.

By accelerating and reducing the cost of moving to the cloud-native platform via KMP, banks have more time, resources and money to invest in their modernization activity. 

For example, banks looking to create new business solutions using generative artificial intelligence (AI) can deploy Red Hat OpenShift AI to create production AI/ML models and run the resulting applications.  

In a recent case, HCLTech helped a large financial organization in the US use generative AI to build learning and knowledge around a historical collection of calls to its helpdesk. The organization used this information to create a rich, intelligent virtual agent solution that can address customer issues and questions quickly and more affordably than a physical service call center operation.