Every day, millions of transactions flow through Emirates NBD’s infrastructure—from retail payments and corporate trade finance to treasury flows and real-time credit decisions.

Historically, large banks have used multiple parallel infrastructures, with virtualization supporting core systems and a separate container platform running modern applications. However, this approach often leads to disparate operations, duplicate tooling, inconsistent security controls, and higher costs. To future-proof its technology infrastructure, Emirates NBD realized it needed to standardize on a single, centralized platform to allow for more efficient management, greater scalability, and better customer service.

Using Red Hat Migration Toolkit for Virtualization to minimize risk and potential customer downtime, the team migrated less critical workloads before progressing to core banking systems. Over time, the bank scaled to migrating as many as 140 machines per night and now operates around 9,000 virtual machines on the platform.

“With Red Hat OpenShift, we created a single unified platform capable of running both virtual machines and containers. This reduces complexity, standardizes observability and security, and creates a consistent developer experience across our 3,000 engineers,” Rio-Tinto said.  

Emirates NBD continues to collaborate with a dedicated Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM) to resolve issues faster, work closely with product teams, and plan for ongoing platform optimization.