Horizon 2030 for Banking: The Virtualization Reset – Simplification, with Richard Harmon

Quick Summary

In this episode of Horizon 2030 for Banking from Red Hat, Richard Harmon, VP and Global Head of Financial Services, discusses automation as the key to simplification and resilience, and how the pace of change in AI adds to the case for standardisation.

Why Does He Link Automation to Resilience?

Richard says that for pretty much all institutions, automation is the key to simplification and to resilience, whether that means protecting against cyber crime or accelerating the ability to address issues. His example is a payment system that has to be available at five nines, which he describes as being down for roughly an hour and a half in a whole year. Many institutions are now running such systems in hybrid multi-cloud environments, and he says that level of operational resilience is not possible without very rigorous automation. Automation accelerates putting patches in, modernising architecture and moving workloads around, and he sees it as a foundation for any architecture, hybrid in particular.

What Role Do Standards Play?

• A standard operating system and standard platforms.
• Operational standards, constraints and security standards.
• Automation as one piece of that standardised approach.

How Does AI Change the Picture?

Richard sees AI as a challenge because it will be in many different places, and because it is accelerating not only in adoption but in its own transformation. The algorithms in use today, he says, will not be the ones in use in two or three years. That means institutions need an environment that is agile, highly resilient and free of duplicated systems.

Find Out More

Red Hat Summit Connect comes to London on 8 October, bringing together the people building the next generation of banking infrastructure. Find out more and register here.

Watch every episode of Horizon 2030 for Banking from Red Hat on FF News, starting with the series trailer.