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.
William Streitberg, Chief Information and Technology Officer at Hong Leong Bank, noted that updating infrastructure requires understanding the right fit for each operation, and that Red Hat has provided a common foundation for both existing and cloud-native workloads, allowing new capabilities to be introduced faster while maintaining the reliability customers expect.
Daniel Aw, Vice President and General Manager for APAC at Red Hat, said that enterprise technology success is increasingly about how effectively solutions work together rather than how many new technologies an organisation adopts. He highlighted that this year’s award winners are building open, flexible foundations that allow them to innovate on their own terms.
Red Hat positions open source as a response to growing complexity in AI, hybrid cloud, and automation strategies, where organisations need the flexibility to choose technologies best suited to their specific business requirements.
Pokdepinion: Cutting deployment cycles from months to weeks is going to net them plenty of benefits down the line.
