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A Modern Approach to Banking with Red Hat OpenShift and F5

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Financial regulations and the desire for greater competition and innovation are driving the need for open banking standards. You're probably familiar with the benefits of third-party providers (TPP), like payment applications, that enable the movement of money between persons in real time. This phenomenon of the last several years to create a seamless manner to transfer monies from one financial institution to another is just one example of open banking, which has led to a whole world of innovation in personal finance. What open banking means in practice, however, is a great variety of API endpoints that are exposed to these TPP fintech solutions. 

Shift to APIs and Agile Development in an Open Banking World

The shift to an API-driven open banking world also coincides with two other key trends in app development: the embrace of agile development processes and the adoption of microservices applications. An agile and modern approach means using containerized cloud-native applications deployed in hybrid cloud infrastructures that span on-premises data centers as well as private or public clouds, with on-demand scaling. Several banking and financial services institutions have standardized on the leading hybrid-cloud Kubernetes platform—OpenShift. Red Hat OpenShift® Container Platform (container PaaS) provides a modular, scalable, cloud-ready, enterprise open-source platform. It includes a rich set of features to build and deploy containerized solutions and a comprehensive PaaS management portal that together extend the underlying Kubernetes platform.

Open Banking Provides New Solutions to New Markets

In many instances, F5 and the Red Hat account teams were already working together to jointly build a scalable and secure containerized solution to create new solutions (i.e., mobile banking) and open new markets (i.e., North Africa). The challenges with open banking are the same. Traditional institutions are addressing the need for open banking and the required flexibility and scale by adopting Red Hat OpenShift.

How F5 technologies help with Open Banking:

  • Provide API-centric security and protect REST-based APIs, as well as east-west gRPC APIs, with web application firewall (WAF), SSL/TLS termination, and bot detection capabilities, etc.
  • Optimize container management and enable scale for container deployments within and across OpenShift clusters.
  • Integrate security and performance into CI/CD pipelines with security automation.
  • Drive business velocity by enabling automation of API deployments, management, and approved security controls.

In a previous blog post, F5 Solution Architect James Lee reviewed how F5 security products can be used in combination with Ansible and OpenShift to deploy an automated security solution that responds to threats in real time. Another blog post on F5 DevCentral spoke about protecting APIs in a Kubernetes environment. Experience has shown us that financial institutions overwhelmingly choose a supported hybrid cloud solution like OpenShift.

F5 provides defense-in-depth capabilities with Red Hat OpenShift

API security and speed are the essential prerequisites for any successful open banking deployment. OpenShift is the most widely deployed hybrid cloud platform that in combination with F5 Container Ingress Services (CIS) or NGINX Ingress Controller can ensure that open banking application deployments are both scalable and secure.