By Super Daddy
Publication Date: 2026-10-03 07:29:00
Hong Leong Bank has been named Malaysia’s winner at the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2026, taking the prize in the Virtualization and Cloud-Native Development category. The bank was recognized for modernizing a critical online business application by moving away from a monolithic architecture to a containerized environment powered by Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Application Foundations.
Hong Leong Bank’s Modernization Efforts
Hong Leong Bank identified scalability limitations and manual processes within a legacy application architecture as key obstacles to its digital banking ambitions. To address this, the bank transitioned the application from a monolithic framework into a containerized environment using Red Hat OpenShift, while also deploying Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to modernize its existing database infrastructure.
The deployment unified virtual machines and containers onto a single common platform, reducing the complexity of managing separate infrastructure stacks. Manual virtual machine patching for containerized workloads was also eliminated as part of the transition. The most measurable outcome from the shift is a dramatic reduction in software deployment cycles, which dropped from months to weeks – applications can now scale dynamically during traffic spikes, giving the bank the agility to deliver new digital banking features at a faster pace without compromising reliability.
