Red Hat Celebrates Affin for Driving Open Source Excellence at the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2025 for Malaysia

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2025 for Malaysia. This year, Red Hat is celebrating AFFIN for their forward thinking use of open source to drive innovation, enable transformation and create meaningful impact across their organisations.

Embodying this year’s theme, “Unlock what’s next,” the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2025 celebrates customers turning these trends into tangible results. The awards recognise 30 winners across the region whose inventive use of Red Hat’s open source technologies has sparked innovation, strengthened competitiveness, and delivered lasting value for their industries, customers, and employees. These organisations demonstrate how open source empowers enterprises to reimagine possibilities, navigate complexity, and seize new opportunities in an evolving landscape to define future competitiveness.

The awards comprise five categories: Digital Transformation, Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud-native Development, Automation – and the newly added AI and Emerging Tech. 

Category: Automation

Winner: AFFIN Group

AFFIN Group, one of Malaysia’s leading financial institutions, provides a comprehensive range of financial products and services to retail, corporate, and Islamic banking customers across the country. With a large and complex IT infrastructure supporting its nationwide operations, the bank recognised the need to improve operational efficiency, reduce manual errors, and ensure consistent compliance through automation.

By adopting the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, AFFIN transformed its server patching, change tracking, and disaster recovery processes. What was once a time-consuming and error-prone manual operation is now fully automated—reducing patching time, minimising configuration errors, and improving overall system reliability. This helped to strengthen the bank’s security posture, reduce downtime, and improve service delivery to customers.

With automation driving consistency and speed, AFFIN has optimised IT costs and reallocated resources toward innovation and strategic growth. This transformation demonstrates how automation can empower financial institutions to move faster, operate more securely, and deliver better digital banking experiences at scale.

Supporting Quotes
Marjet Andriesse, senior vice president and general manager, APJC, Red Hat

“The pace of change in Asia Pacific shows no signs of slowing, especially as AI becomes a core driver of business transformation. Despite these demands, our customers have delivered remarkable results, showing that innovation thrives when paired with open source. The Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2025 are an opportune time to recognise and celebrate these achievements, highlighting how our customers are unlocking what’s next and shaping a future defined by creativity, resilience, and impact.”

Risham Akashah Bin Kamaruzaman, Group Chief Technology & Operating Officer, AFFIN Group

“As a progressive financial institution, maintaining the highest standards of security, compliance, and reliability is essential to sustaining our customers’ trust. In line with AFFIN’s Axelerate 2028 (AX28) Strategic Plan under the Digital Leadership pillar, we are driving greater efficiency and innovation across the organisation. Our collaboration with Red Hat has enabled the automation of complex IT processes, strengthening our security posture, enhancing compliance, and improving operational efficiency. This has led to higher service uptime, reduced risks, and increased agility in delivering world-class digital banking experiences. Automation is now central to how AFFIN operates, powering a more resilient, efficient, and technology-driven future.”

ABOUT RED HAT
Red Hat is the open hybrid cloud technology leader, delivering a trusted, consistent and comprehensive foundation for transformative IT innovation and AI applications. Its portfolio of cloud, developer, AI, Linux, automation and application platform technologies enables any application, anywhere—from the datacenter to the edge. As the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, Red Hat invests in open ecosystems and communities to solve tomorrow’s IT challenges. Collaborating with partners and customers, Red Hat helps them build, connect, automate, secure and manage their IT environments, supported by consulting services and award-winning training and certification offerings.

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