Safaricom Selects Red Hat to Drive Financial Inclusion
Safaricom, the Kenyan telecommunications provider, has implemented Red Hat OpenShift as its cloud platform to support applications including its M-PESA mobile payment system, the companies announced at Mobile World Congress.
Safaricom, which serves more than 45 million subscribers across Kenya's mobile network, operates M-PESA, a mobile banking platform handling over US$314bn in annual transactions for 51 million customers across Africa.
The system provides financial services to populations with limited access to traditional banking infrastructure.
Cloud migration addresses stability concerns
The telecommunications firm identified a need to transition from monolithic infrastructure to a cloud-native architecture based on containers and microservices to support its digital transformation goals.
Containers allow applications to run consistently across different computing environments by packaging software with all its dependencies.
Safaricom initially deployed open-source Kubernetes, an orchestration system for managing containerised applications, but encountered stability issues.
The company subsequently migrated to Red Hat OpenShift, an enterprise Kubernetes platform with additional security, management and support features.
"Customer experience is paramount for us and with Red Hat's platforms and support teams we have been able to gain performance improvements across our entire IT infrastructure," says Duncan Kabira Ndirangu, Head of IT infrastructure at Safaricom.
The implementation was conducted in collaboration with Copy Cat Group, a systems integrator, alongside Red Hat's technical team.
The project included alignment of processes across security, application development and platform teams through workshops focused on DevOps methodologies, which combine software development and IT operations practices.
In 2024, Safaricom expanded its deployment to include Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, incorporating additional cybersecurity capabilities through Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security and centralised management via Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes.
"Customer experience is paramount for us and with Red Hat's platforms and support teams we have been able to gain performance improvements across our entire IT infrastructure"
Performance metrics show significant improvements
Red Hat OpenShift now functions as the core container platform in Safaricom's IT environment, supporting approximately 70% of its critical applications.
The company is transitioning much of its infrastructure to run Red Hat OpenShift on bare-metal servers rather than virtualised environments to increase control and economic efficiency.
The platform migration has delivered several measurable improvements. System availability has increased from 93% to 99.98%, while solution deployment time has halved. For example, Hustler Fund, a digital financial inclusion initiative, was developed and launched in one month.
Automated processes have reduced cluster deployment time from two days to two hours. The platform has also enabled Safaricom to adapt to traffic fluctuations by scaling applications based on demand patterns.
"Safaricom has high requirements around agility, stability and scale-out design to support its business-critical applications where performance directly impacts customers, including millions of users reliant on M-PESA banking services," says Fran Heeran, Vice President of Global Telecommunications at Red Hat.
Safaricom is now assessing opportunities to expand these capabilities into its network infrastructure, including its 5G core. The company is developing a proof-of-concept before scaling the deployment.
"Red Hat has been a pivotal partner in Safaricom's journey from a traditional telecommunications company to a technology-driven organisation," says James Maitai, Chief Technology Information Officer at Safaricom.
"Through its innovative solutions and open source expertise, Red Hat has enabled us to enhance our internal efficiencies, streamline operations and accelerate our digital transformation."
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