National Information Resources Service Daegu Center and Orange Life Named Winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 for Korea

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 for South Korea. The National Information Resources Service (NIRS) Daegu Center and Orange Life were honored at the Red Hat Forum Asia Pacific 2020 today for their exceptional and innovative use of Red Hat solutions.

In response to the recent global events that are causing consumer shifts, many organizations are accelerating their digital transformation efforts to adapt. In a November 2019 study sponsored by Red Hat, 95% of APAC executives surveyed said digital transformation has gained importance and perceived it as a strategy for both survival and growth in the new normal. This has increased the need to use innovative technologies to create new business models, products or services.

Since there is no one-size-fits-all blueprint for digital transformation, this year’s Red Hat Forum Asia Pacific aims to inspire organizations to unleash the power of open source technologies to achieve their short-term goals and future-proof their business for the next normal. To support that, the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 recognize the technological achievements of organizations that demonstrate creative thinking, determined problem solving and creative use of Red Hat solutions to make a difference in their business, industry or society.

The winners were selected based on the impact of their Red Hat deployments on their business goals, industry and communities, as well as the uniqueness of vision for the project. They displayed how open source platforms and culture have helped them improve productivity, agility and cost savings while empowering them to address future challenges and emerging trends more confidently and effectively. This year’s awards honored 27 APAC organizations across five categories: digital transformation, hybrid cloud infrastructure, cloud-native development, automation and resilience. This year’s winners for South Korea include:

Categories: Digital Transformation and Automation
Winner: National Information Resources Service (NIRS) Daegu Center 

Established in 2005, the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) is the world's first pan-governmental integrated data center. As an affiliated institution of the Ministry of Interior and Safety, NIRS controls the operation, efficient integration and deployment, and security of information systems and national information communications networks for central administrative agencies, local governments and public organizations. It offers high-quality ICT services and is currently operating 1,230 digital government services to local government officials and the general public.

To achieve its vision of becoming an Intelligent Cloud Computing Center, NIRS Daegu Center’s planning team is building a software-defined data center (SDDC) for its government cloud. 

The SDDC will accelerate cloud migration for government and public organizations to support the South Korean government’s “cloud first’ initiative. It will offer an automated infrastructure through software-defined compute, network, and storage, to provide a standardized platform that can effectively support artificial intelligence (AI), big data and Internet of Things (IoT) services. NIRS used multiple Red Hat solutions to power the SDDC including Red Hat Cloud Suite, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Virtualization, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Red Hat Gluster Storage, Red Hat JBoss Web Server, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Runtimes and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Virtual Datacenters. The SDDC is also supported by Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat Smart Management and Red Hat Integration. 

The SDDC will empower NIRS Daegu Center to provision faster infrastructure services through cloud and reduce its IT spend through optimization. NIRS Daegu Center aims to connect the disparate work systems (currently around 580 work systems across 80 public institutes) of its occupants and enables it to centrally manage the underlying IT infrastructure, and free up more time for its occupants’ IT staff to focus on enhancing services for citizens.

Categories: Digital Transformation and Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
Winner: Orange Life

Orange Life, a subsidiary of Shinhan Financial Group, is a life insurance company with global class management capabilities and dominant financial strength that has been keeping pace with the development and growth of the life insurance industry in Korea ever since its establishment in 1987.

It initially relied on Unix as its primary operating system and a traditional three-tier architecture with server virtualization, which were unable to support its new organizational structure centered on agile transformation. The existing infrastructure was highly dependent on administrators and operators, and made it difficult to adopt automation.  

With support from Red Hat Consulting, Orange Life adopted Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Quay and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes to be cloud-ready, reduce cost and enable the company to be more agile and speed up innovation. It used Red Hat OpenShift to transform its applications to become cloud-native so that it can be easily migrated to the cloud in future. By moving most of its web-based applications to Red Hat OpenShift, Orange Life can also run 10 times more applications per node, lowering its IT spend on hardware and software by 50% as compared to using its previous architecture. 

Additionally, Red Hat OpenShift provides an efficient environment for Orange Life’s developers that enables them to quickly reproduce the same applications or reuse microservices. This helps developers to focus on development and the quality of applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, thereby accelerating speed-to-market and ensuring the delivery of good customer experience.

This marks the second consecutive year that Shinhan Financial Group entities have been recognized as Red Hat APAC Innovation Award winners, with Shinhan Bank named in 2019. 

The Digital Transformation category recognizes organizations that have successfully addressed IT challenges and delivered business value to effectively compete as a digital enterprise. The Automation category highlights projects that most successfully automated processes, workflows, tasks and IT operations to rapidly implement innovative and disruptive technologies and practices. The Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure category showcases a collaborative public, private or open hybrid cloud deployment. 

Supporting Quotes

Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, senior vice president and general manager, APAC, Red Hat

“2020 has been a year of uncertainties – but also possibilities. It’s inspiring to see how organizations in Asia Pacific are using open source to quickly and effectively meet changing market landscapes and consumer demands. Congratulations to this year’s winners, who we believe will become role models to other organizations looking for ideas to transform their business. We look forward to working with our customers to help them address the many real challenges our customers face today, and unlock the unlimited possibilities of taking the business forward.”

Hunjoon Kim, planning team lead, National Information Resources Service (NIRS) Daegu Center
"To fully benefit from the cloud, it is imperative for the cloud environment to have the ability to improve operational efficiency and effectively support changes such as the use of the latest technology. Red Hat’s solutions have collectively helped us embrace standardized platforms, automation and open source technology. This enables us to help the local government and public institutions enhance their application development capabilities and continue delivering citizen-centric digital services in an agile manner.”

Sangwook Han, vice president and head of IT Group, Orange Life
“Orange Life constantly strives to be a customer-centric organization that pursues service excellence and growth. With Red Hat supporting our agile transformation, we’re able to deliver more reliable, high-quality, innovative services to our customers at speed, while becoming more cost-effective. The new platform will also be the foundation for our business growth as it can easily cope with increasing workloads or scale on-demand in future.”