Multicluster management secrets Bradesco revealed at Red Hat Summit 2025

At Red Hat Summit 2025, attendees got an inside look at how Banco Bradesco, one of Brazil's largest financial groups, transformed its complex IT landscape. With 99% of its transactions occurring on digital channels, the bank’s infrastructure is not just a cost center, it's the engine driving the business. The session detailed how Bradesco moved from a state of individual multicluster management to one of automated, centralized control.

The challenge: Taming a sprawling hybrid cloud

By the end of 2023, Bradesco's environment was a picture of modern IT complexity. The bank was running 90 Red Hat OpenShift clusters across on-premises, Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift, and Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud environments. This scale brought significant challenges, including decentralized management, inconsistent standards, high operating costs, and configuration drift that created operational risk. Their goal was clear: standardize settings, centralize management, and enforce a consistent configuration state across the entire fleet.

The solution: Centralized control and automated governance

To tackle these issues, Bradesco adopted Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management at its core. The bank moved quickly and installed Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management in January 2024, and began policy development just a month later.

Using Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management as a centralized control plane, Bradesco implemented a sophisticated governance framework:

• Policy as code: They developed over 80 custom policies to automate governance. Using the Compliance Operator, they now enforce National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidance across all clusters.
• Centralized metrics: All cluster data from Prometheus is collected in a central Azure Blob Storage and visualized in Grafana. This provides a single source of truth for operations and FinOps cost analysis.
• Enterprise integration: The platform is integrated with ServiceNow to automatically generate tickets for policy violations, creating a seamless workflow between automation and human intervention.

The results: Agility, savings, and strategic advantage

Bradesco's results demonstrate the power of this approach. They achieved an 88% reduction in their change cycle time, from 50 hours down to just 6 hours. While achieving this efficiency, they successfully scaled to 130 clusters.

Other key outcomes include:

• Infrastructure as code: 100% of settings are managed by code, eliminating configuration drift.
• Self-remediation: The system has self-remediated 17 violations, mitigating potential infrastructure impacts.
• Centralized data: Centralized data has unlocked opportunities to save millions of Reais and now informs everything from project planning to commercial negotiations.

Bradesco's story is a powerful testament to what's possible when you apply a consistent management layer across a hybrid cloud. It's a strategy built for both operational excellence and strategic business insight, a point underscored by a Bradesco engineer being named Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year 2025.

Inspired by Bradesco's success? See how you can gain visibility and control over your cluster fleet. Try the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management trial or explore the documentation.