500 servers patched in four hours: Learn how we helped customers with automation, security and containerization

We just wrapped up AnsibleFest 2021, which included customer spotlight sessions showcasing some of the ways Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform can help organizations scale and increase collaboration. 

Is automation your organization’s focus area right now? Or is it security, application development or infrastructure modernization? Many of our customers find that it might not just be one platform or service, but a combination of technology solutions and services within Red Hat’s portfolio that could help address their needs. 

Let’s see how Emory University, PERKESO, and Ativa Investimentos deployed solutions like Red Hat Automation Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and more to swiftly navigate their IT challenges.

Automation saves the day

Emory University is a US research university with 15,000 students at its metro Atlanta campuses and research ties with institutions around the globe. The school’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) is tasked with maintaining systems for students, staff, faculty, researchers, and other stakeholders to ensure that networks and data are protected from unauthorized access and potential security breaches. 

In January 2021, OIT’s security team needed to respond to a vulnerability found in the sudo utility in RHEL. The vulnerability stretched over several university departments and business units.

With more than 500 servers using RHEL under their charge, OIT knew they had a difficult road ahead if they had to install the patch manually, which could have put the university’s infrastructure in danger. 

They rely on Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform as a single automation solution that helps Emory’s various IT teams collaborate. They used an Ansible Playbook to apply the patches automatically to each server. What might have taken up to two weeks to remediate across all servers took collectively four hours.

“We were in a time crunch. We saw that we had this great tool in Ansible Automation Platform that could easily handle a project of this scope,” said Steve Siegelman, Manager of Systems Engineering at Emory’s OIT. “It did the job; we couldn’t have made this fix in a timely manner without automation.”

The need for automation remains critical to Emory’s plans moving forward, especially as it transitions to the cloud. Find out more about how Ansible Automation Platform is helping Emory find success in the full case study.

A suite of Red Hat solutions “for the country”

Malaysia’s social security organization, Pertubuhan Keselamatan Sosial (PERKESO), sought to replace its manual, in-person transactions with more flexible virtual processes to improve accuracy and enhance its customer experience.

Working with local IT specialist and Red Hat partner Wiseyes, as well as Red Hat Consulting, PERKESO deployed RHEL and a custom, modular application integrated with Red Hat Fuse. 

Fuse is a distributed integration platform that connects everything from legacy systems and application programming interfaces (APIs) to Internet of Things (IoT) devices and more.

The organization also created new digital business workflows with Red Hat Process Automation Manager, and these workflows and processes were deployed on Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) and Red Hat JBoss Web Server to support critical web services and applications.

“With Red Hat, we have everything we need to support our operations in a single technology suite,” said Edmund Cheng, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer, PERKESO. 

With its new application running on RHEL and integrated with its legacy systems through Red Hat Fuse, PERKESO has reduced the number of manual processes by close to 75%, leading to less costs for the organization to administer services and significant time savings for businesses and citizens.

PERKESO has also used its shift to more efficient digital processes to accommodate growth in both its user base and the industries protected—for example, self-employed workers such as taxi or rideshare drivers.

“With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we became much more agile,” Cheng said in a video that captures how Red Hat technologies helped PERKESO navigate challenges and implement new initiatives during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“The war cry at that time was ‘Damine Negara.’ ‘Damine Negara’ means ‘for the country,’" said Cheng. Check out the full case study to see how Red Hat helped PERKESO modernize its legacy system architecture to deliver services faster to its users.

An open banking approach with containerization

Ativa Investimentos is a broker with more than 35 years’ experience and a comprehensive financial portfolio to meet the needs of Brazilian investors. The broker sought to create a cloud services platform and develop an open banking approach, where financial institutions integrate and share data using application programming interfaces (APIs) to improve customer services. Additionally, it had to ensure its IT environment was compliant with Brazil’s General Data Protection Law (LGPD) that went into effect in February 2020.

After completing market research and considering solutions from several providers, Ativa chose to build its new, container- and microservices-based services platform using Red Hat OpenShift. This solution was recommended by Dell Computadores do Brasil, a local division of Red Hat partner Dell EMC and one of Ativa’s server hardware providers.

The broker now hosts its new customer-facing applications on Red Hat OpenShift, from account creation and management to buying and selling assets such as shares, investment funds, initial public offerings (IPOs), and private pension plans. The new architecture also supports several internal, back-end processes, such as Ativa’s customer database and transaction-related workflows.

With a responsive yet reliable platform for building and hosting its applications and services, Ativa can launch new products for its customers and offer them through new channels, such as the broker’s new, innovative mobile app. Using the microservices-based environment and Red Hat OpenShift, Ativa has simplified provisioning processes to develop its new products faster. 

Compared to its previous platform technology, Ativa can now flexibly scale its Red Hat OpenShift environment to support higher transaction volumes as needed with less compute and memory resources. This responsiveness will help the broker respond faster to exponential growth of its customer base

Read more about how Ativa also counted on expert Red Hat support in its container adoption journey in the full case study.

But wait, there's more!

Red Hat regularly publishes case studies to help illustrate how our products and services can help organizations find more agile ways of solving their greatest IT challenges. Visit our Red Hat Success Stories page to see how Red Hat technologies can be used to address your organization’s most pressing IT challenges too.