Project Name
Standardising on OpenShift for a North American Fintech: 30% Faster Incident Response
A mid-sized fintech company providing payments and lending infrastructure to regional banks and credit unions had arrived at a platform problem no one had caused deliberately. As engineering headcount grew, individual teams had made independent decisions about how to run containerised workloads. Some adopted self-managed OKD clusters for cost and flexibility. Others, closer to regulated payment-processing workloads, were pushing for OpenShift Container Platform and the vendor support it provided. Neither choice was wrong on its own. The result was a company running two different Kubernetes distributions with two different support models, two different compliance postures, and no documented rationale behind either.
Ksolves ran a structured OKD versus OpenShift Container Platform evaluation against the company’s compliance obligations, support requirements, and scaling trajectory, and delivered a single documented platform decision that every team and auditor could stand behind.
- Two Kubernetes Distributions Running in Parallel: Some engineering teams ran self-managed OKD clusters with no vendor SLA while others had begun requesting OpenShift Container Platform, leaving the organisation with two container platforms, two operational models, and no company-wide decision behind either.
- No Documented Rationale for Either Platform Choice: Each team had picked its platform independently based on its own priorities, with no shared evaluation of how OKD and OpenShift Container Platform compared against the company's compliance, support, and scaling requirements.
- Inconsistent Compliance Posture Across Teams: Each team defined its own security and operational controls, causing audit findings to vary significantly from one team's clusters to another and creating uneven regulatory exposure for a company handling payment data.
- Fragmented and Duplicated Support Relationships: Some teams had no formal support behind their clusters while others were independently pursuing vendor agreements, resulting in duplicated effort and no consolidated SLA covering the company's container footprint.
- Slower Incident Response from Inconsistent Operational Practices: Because clusters were configured and operated team to team differently, platform-related incidents took longer to diagnose and resolve since responders could not rely on a consistent operational model across the environments they supported.
Ksolves ran a structured evaluation of OKD versus OpenShift Container Platform, scored directly against the company's compliance obligations, required support model, and expected scaling trajectory, producing a documented, defensible basis for a single company-wide platform decision.
- Structured OKD vs OpenShift Container Platform Evaluation: Both platforms were scored against compliance obligations, support model requirements, and scaling trajectory, producing written documentation covering every trade-off that any team or auditor could review and rely on.
- Single Documented Target Platform Selected: A single target platform was selected for the organisation going forward, backed by written rationale covering compliance, support, and cost trade-offs, replacing the ad hoc team-by-team platform choices that had produced the fragmented environment.
- Migration Paths Designed for Every Existing Workload: A tailored, risk-sequenced migration plan was built for each team's existing workloads, giving teams already running self-managed OKD clusters a clear, low-disruption path onto the standardised platform.
- Shared Compliance Baseline Established Across All Teams: A single set of security and operational controls was defined and applied consistently to every workload on the new platform, replacing the patchwork of team-defined controls that had produced inconsistent audit findings.
- Support Consolidated Under a Single Vendor SLA: The fragmented mix of no-support and independently pursued vendor agreements was replaced with one company-wide support relationship and escalation path covering every team's workloads.
- Data Layer Standardised Alongside the Platform: Platform standardisation was paired with a consistent PostgreSQL-based data layer pattern for stateful workloads, closing another source of team-by-team operational divergence.
Technology Stack
| Category | Technology |
|---|---|
| Target Platform | Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform |
| Evaluation Baseline | OKD |
| Database | PostgreSQL |
| Compliance Enforcement | OpenShift Compliance Operator |
| Migration | OpenShift Migration Toolkit |
| Support | Red Hat Enterprise Support |
- 30% Reduction in Platform Incident Response Time: The standardised platform and shared operational model cut platform-related incident response time by 30%, replacing the inconsistent team-by-team configurations that had slowed diagnosis and resolution.
- Support Consolidated Under a Single SLA: Every team now escalates through one consolidated, vendor-backed support agreement, replacing fragmented, duplicated, and in some cases absent support arrangements with a single relationship covering the company's full container footprint.
- Consistent Compliance Evidence Across All Teams: A shared compliance baseline now produces consistent, auditable evidence across every team's workloads, replacing audit findings that varied significantly depending on which team's controls were being reviewed.
- Documented Platform Decision Governing All New Workloads: A single, formally evaluated and documented platform decision now governs every new workload company-wide, replacing the ad hoc team-level choices that had produced the fragmented environment.
- Every Existing Workload Has a Defined Migration Path: Every team running self-managed OKD has a documented, risk-sequenced migration plan onto the standardised platform, removing the uncertainty that had left some teams without a viable route to a supported environment.
“We were not fighting about which platform was better. We just had never actually decided as a company. Having someone lay out the trade-offs against our own compliance and support requirements made the decision obvious once we saw it written down.”
– CTO, Mid-Size Fintech Company, North America
The client chose Ksolves Red Hat OpenShift Consulting Services to resolve a platform fragmentation problem that had grown from reasonable team-level decisions into a company-wide compliance and operational liability. The engagement delivered a formally evaluated, documented platform decision, a shared compliance baseline, and a migration path for every existing workload.
Before this engagement, the company was running two Kubernetes distributions with no unified support, inconsistent compliance controls, and no documented rationale for either choice. After the OpenShift platform standardisation, incident response time dropped by 30%, every team’s workloads sit under a single SLA, and audit findings are consistent across the organisation for the first time.
With a documented platform decision and standardised migration paths in place, new teams and workloads can adopt the platform without repeating the evaluation the company had never done company-wide.
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