Leading Saudi banking institution eyes greater scalability and speed to market through cloud-native adoption and digital transformation fueled by Red Hat’s open source technologies

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Riyad Bank, a leading financial institution in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), has implemented a hybrid cloud strategy built on Red Hat’s portfolio of open hybrid cloud technologies, including Red Hat OpenShift. 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.

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. To meet these varied needs, Riyad Bank selected the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform in Red Hat OpenShift for cross-organizational 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 organizational 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.

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.