SANTALUCÍA digitalizes user experience with Red Hat for greater business efficiency and faster time to innovation

Red Hat announced this week that SANTALUCÍA Group is embracing Red Hat’s agile integration and open hybrid cloud technologies as part of its ongoing strategic plan for digital transformation.

With Red Hat’s unified integration portfolio delivering the core integration, messaging and API management functionality, and Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, serving as a common platform to run containerized applications across its infrastructure, SANTALUCÍA has gained greater flexibility and scalability, with automated operations optimized for developer productivity and innovation as it builds out its hybrid cloud strategy going forward.

SANTALUCÍA can now benefit from an accelerated software development process. One of the first services it has since built and launched is its API Portal for developers, which is helping the business to increase consistency and interoperability between applications, and facilitate the sharing and provision of services between group companies and with third parties. It has also redesigned its digital contracting strategy to enable automation and an improved user experience during the sign up process for customers. 

This is powering its new cross-platform application for home insurance, among others. Being able to push out improvements to the customer journey and launch new services more frequently than before helps the organization to gain deeper and broader relationships with customers.

Through this initiative, the Spanish insurer is aiming to better meet the changing needs and preferences of its customers, reinforce its relevance and core business leadership in the digital age, and open new areas for growth by accelerating the time to market for new customer channels and services.

To support its transformation efforts, SANTALUCÍA adopted an agile integration approach that harnesses open APIs (application programming interfaces), microservices and containers to build, connect and manage new cloud-native applications faster and more easily, as well as more efficiently connect and manage heterogeneous applications, data and devices that have proliferated throughout the organization in recent decades.

"SANTALUCÍA recognised that keeping up with market disruption requires excellence in meeting customer expectations. The challenges of achieving agility and dynamism, as well as reducing release cycles for new products and services, can be addressed with the help of hybrid cloud architectures and modern software processes,” said Julia Bernal, country manager, Spain and Portugal, Red Hat. “Red Hat is proud to support SANTALUCÍA along its digital transformation journey, helping it to be more technologically efficient and to innovate to meet the evolving needs of customers using our agile integration blueprint for enterprise architecture."

"As SANTALUCÍA approaches its 100th year, our focus on customer experience remains steady, while our business continues to transform. The agile integration approach that we are enacting with Red Hat is helping us become a faster, more efficient and more adaptable organization, in terms of IT and digitalization,” said Javier Sanchis Bonilla, director arquitectura, SANTALUCÍA. “Combining open source innovation and flexibility with features designed for security and reliability, Red Hat technology and expertise is enabling us to create new opportunities with our partners and build stronger relationships with our customers."

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 adds developer tools and security certifications; expands automation capabilities

Red Hat has announced general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1, the latest version of its enterprise Linux platform. The first minor release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 enhances the manageability, security and performance of the operating system underpinning the open hybrid cloud, while also adding new capabilities to drive developer innovation.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the foundation of Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud portfolio, providing the underlying engine that allows complex workloads to be developed and deployed across physical, virtual, private and public cloud environments with greater confidence and control. 

As the backbone of the hybrid cloud, the enterprise Linux platform provides a consistent user experience across on premise deployments and all major public cloud infrastructures. At the same time, it supports key production workloads like Microsoft SQL Server and SAP HANA while also enabling new workloads like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 is the first Red Hat Enterprise Linux release to follow the predictable release cadence announced at Red Hat Summit 2019, with minor releases available every six months. This schedule provides Red Hat’s customers and partners with the capacity to more deliberately prepare for new releases, while minimizing unplanned outages and downtime of critical systems. 

The predictable release cycle also enables Red Hat partners, from software providers to hardware vendors, to build and deliver the next generation of their innovative offerings with a clear timetable of when a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 release will be available.

All supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions now include access to Red Hat Insights, Red Hat’s proactive analytics offering. Intended to help address configuration and other system issues before they impact production, Red Hat Insights has more than 1,000 rules for operating Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-premises or on public clouds such as AWS and Microsoft Azure. 

  

These rules support analytics for workloads such as SAP HANA and Microsoft SQL Server and help IT administrators to more quickly address performance, security, availability and stability risks to keep operations running smoothly.  

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 also adds new Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles, streamlining the process for setting up Red Hat Enterprise Linux subsystems to handle specific functions, such as storage, networking, time synchronization, kdump and SElinux. This expands the existing collection of Ansible system roles for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, better supplementing configuration automation across various versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployed as the backbone of enterprise IT infrastructure.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 is also the initial Red Hat Enterprise Linux release in the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux development lifecycle, which includes communities, projects and programs  to meet specific developer needs.

Fedora provides an opportunity for developers to engage with the future of the Linux kernel and encourages participation to shape the leading-edge of the operating system. CentOS Stream provides ecosystem developers with a "rolling preview" of what’s next in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, helping them build production applications with the future in mind.

The Red Hat Universal Base Image, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, offers a cost-free, redistributable image for creating cloud-native applications based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This provides a clear path for developers to more easily create applications that are ready for certification and production across Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud portfolio.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Subscription, a no-cost, self-supported subscription that provides a dev/test environment for applications that are meant to be deployed into production on the enterprise Linux platform.

As global organizations seek to gain a competitive edge or simply serve their end users better, they often look to transform through digital technologies like Linux containers, microservices, Kubernetes or hybrid cloud services. All of this innovation, however, requires the same level of security and compliance scrutiny of traditional software and hardware deployments. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 continues Red Hat’s commitment to delivering open innovation paired with the software security advancements required to protect sensitive data and workloads.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 adds full support for live kernel patching to help IT operations teams keep pace with a shifting threat landscape without incurring excessive system downtime. Kernel updates can now be applied to remediate Critical or Important Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), while reducing the need for a system reboot, helping to keep critical workloads running more securely. 

Additional security enhancements include enhanced CVE remediation, kernel-level memory protection and application whitelisting technologies. 

Container-centric SELinux profiles are included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1, making it possible to create more tailored security policies to control how containerized services access host system resources. This makes it easier to harden production systems against security threats targeting cloud-native applications and provides a more streamlined way to maintain regulatory compliance by reducing the risk of running privileged containers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 is now available for active Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions via the Red Hat Customer Portal. Members of the Red Hat Developer program may also obtain the latest releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux at no-cost.