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Automation on the rise

Red Hat recently hosted an online event about their automation solutions and how they have helped customers move from manual to digital. Red Hat Country Manager for Malaysia and Brunei, Eric Quah said, “In the nine months since the MCO began, a lot of organisations did not allow employees to go back to work.

“But they still needed to do things like patch servers, and other important processes to ensure business will not be disrupted.”

Eric said this got IT teams to think about how to support operations without having to have manual intervention in term of IT operations.

The awareness that automation can be key strategy in view of the current situation everyone is in, has led to triple digit growth of Red Hat’s automation portfolio in Malaysia. “It is one of the fastest growing portfolio,” Eric shared.

He explained that this is no surprise seeing as how automation has become a need. ‘And we want to continue to focus on this area to help more of our customers.”

Independent and addressing APAC’s DX demand

Despite being acquired by IBM, Eric shared that Red Hat still runs independently with its own go-to-market strategy, product portfolio, strategy, and so on.

The awareness that automation can be key strategy in view of the current situation everyone is in, has led to triple digit growth of Red Hat’s automation portfolio in Malaysia. “It is one of the fastest growing portfolio,” Eric shared.

“We are well known for open source operating system, and from a single product company our portfolio has grown so big. A majority of our revenue comes from non-operating system systems, like middleware, (know-how on) how to build cloud native operations, and so on,” he said.

He also referred to a Harvard Business Review (HBR) survey that saw 95-percent of execs surveyed, say that digital transformation has gained importance in the last 18 months. The pandemic may even have accelerated digital transformation implementations with a lot of customers.

Eighty-percent respondents say that cultural change and tech modernisation are of equal importance.

In fact, APAC execs see more success with their DX projects compared with rest of world, and 40-percent of respondents say they can quickly develop and deploy apps, compared to global average of 23-percent.

This seems to imply that the ability to quickly develop and deploy apps, is an important part of DX success.

Automation

According to Eric, anything that involves processes and operations can be automated. “It is the heart and core of most, or all of our customers’ organisations.” Examples of this are like approving loans or credit.

He also said Red Hat’s Ansible automation platform is the foundation for building and operating automation services at scale.

In Malaysia at least, the banking sector grew their need for automation, and Red Hat found themselves having to answer questions like, “How can we help banks automate their processes so they are compliant with regulations, as well as ensure business continuity?”

Another question that arose also came from the the data centre industry, and how to build data centres that are driven mostly by software. This question came about from the need for banks to continue simulating their disaster recovery capability to ensure business continuity in the event of a disruption.

“In the past one year, our portfolio grew with a lot of use cases, “ Eric said. For example, Banks realised their cannot physically access the data centre, but need to have mundane processes executed, in accordance with disaster recovery (DR) requirements by Bank Negara.

This question came about from the need for banks to continue simulating their disaster recovery capability to ensure business continuity in the event of a disruption.

“Now getting people into a data centre is almost impossible,” Eric said, and explained that Red Hat worked with a few banks to use Ansible as core platform to achieve DR automation. So, customers can create “playbooks”and in few clicks simulate a DR exercise.

“As tech advances there are a lot more threats, necessitating servers, operating systems and applications to be constantly patched.

“OS patching, hardening, virtual machine provisioning… these are classic examples of how banks and telcpos orchestrate IT, and automate multiple processes to ensure IT processes are always at optimum.”

Having pre-built ‘playbooks’ increases reliability because it reduces human intervention throughout the whole process.

Automation and compliance

The financial services industry (FSI) is a highly regulated industry, and Bank Negara in continuing to protect Malaysian citizens will continue to update requirements and ensure FIs adhere to standard processes.

In terms of the RMiT (Risk Management in in Technology), a majority of requirements can be adhered to via automation.

“We have begun with quire a number (of FIs) in Malaysia. Not only does it help lower risk, it improves efficiency and drives more business outcome,” Eric concluded.