In order to better support increasing customer digital demands, Nationwide wanted to build an event-driven integration platform that could better manage its system architecture, scale responsively when needed and bridge to modern cloud-native applications.The first step was creating a new platform, named Speed Layer, using open hybrid cloud technologies Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Speed Layer was built to gather accurate real-time data to enable the business to respond to events as they occur. It has now been adopted as the foundation for strategic operations throughout the organisation.Running on Red Hat OpenShift, Nationwide is able to harness open source technologies such as Kafka for distributed event storage and stream processing and MongoDB for database management to help support ongoing service access during outages. Kubernetes-based event-driven autoscaling enables Speed Layer to reconcile over 100,000 data items per second, meaning data can be made available to Nationwide’s banking app faster than before.The platform can now dynamically upgrade or launch new capabilities for the builing society, and customers can continue to use services during outages - planned or otherwise.With the build out completed, Nationwide is equipped to deploy and scale applications across a choice of clouds. Red Hat OpenShift is currently supporting deployments using Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud and on-premise Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Nationwide’s .Grant Valentine, head of business integration platform, Nationwide Building Society says the BIP team is prepared for future migration of critical production workloads to the cloud within the next year.“As digital requirements continue to evolve, whether volume of payments, banking app users, regulation, or system scalability, we have to be prepared for as yet unknown demands and channels," he says. "Our Business Integration Platform powers many of our strategic initiatives and running it on Red Hat OpenShift gives us hybrid cloud choice, robust performance and business agility so we can provide a faster and more convenient experience for our members.”