Red Hat helps Nationwide Building Society

Red Hat has collaborated with Nationwide Building Society to build and scale its new Business Integration Platform (BIP) to improve customer engagement for 16 million members. Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, is helping Nationwide achieve service availability of 99.999% and enable faster deployment of upgrades and launches.

Nationwide is the world's largest building society, with over 17 million customers, 16 million of whom have a current account, mortgage or savings product, and are therefore members of the Society. In order to better support increasing customer digital demands, Nationwide wanted to build an event-driven integration platform that could better manage its system architecture, scale responsively when needed and bridge to modern cloud-native applications.

Red Hat has helped Nationwide to grow its capabilities in cloud-based automation and DevOps. The first step was creating a new platform, named Speed Layer, using open hybrid cloud technologies Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Speed Layer was built to gather accurate real-time data to enable the business to respond to events as they occur. With the success of Speed Layer in demonstrating resilience, scalability and efficiency, Nationwide saw the potential to create a further-reaching integration platform across its business. Nationwide worked with Red Hat Consulting to plan and build its BIP on Red Hat OpenShift with minimal impact to its network, platform and applications, and it has now been adopted as the foundation for strategic operations throughout the organisation.

Running on Red Hat OpenShift, Nationwide is able to harness open source technologies such as Kafka for distributed event storage and stream processing and MongoDB for database management to help support ongoing service access during outages. Kubernetes-based event-driven autoscaling (KEDA) enables Speed Layer to reconcile over 100,000 data items per second, meaning data can be made available to Nationwide’s Banking App faster than before, helping users manage their accounts more easily. Red Hat OpenShift provides built-in security features, including network and container isolation and controlled access to application data, consistently across any underlying environment.

Red Hat OpenShift’s self-service and automation capabilities across the lifecycle of containerized applications help speed up operations. It can dynamically upgrade or launch new capabilities, and its members can continue to use services during outages – planned or otherwise.

With its Red Hat OpenShift-based Business Integration Platform (BIP) Nationwide is now able to:

Process 100 million calls daily, including 14 million external queries

Support one-time password (OTP) authentication, SAP systems and other functions in addition to Speed Layer

Maintain service availability rates at 99.999%

Achieve processing times up to 500% faster

Apply upgrades more quickly to its 140 servers across all environments, development and production.

Red Hat OpenShift provides the flexibility to deploy and scale applications across a choice of clouds so the business can run applications where best for scalability, compliance, and performance. This hybrid cloud readiness positions Nationwide to adapt to changing business or regulatory needs. Red Hat OpenShift is currently supporting BIP deployments using Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud and on-premise Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the BIP team is prepared for future migration of critical production workloads to the cloud within the next year.

Looking ahead, Nationwide’s 50-strong BIP team now has a blueprint for automating more workflows throughout the building society and plans to continue scaling the platform to support every function across the organisation in the next year.