Microsoft and Red Hat show how Azure Red Hat OpenShift powers modernization and production AI with secure, scalable enterprise governance.
At Red Hat Summit 2026, Microsoft and Red Hat highlight how Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift supports modernization and production AI workloads—helping organizations move from AI pilots to production systems with consistent governance, security, and scale.
Red Hat Ecosystem Innovation Award for Platform Modernization
Microsoft was recognized as the Platform Modernization Partner of the Year for the 2026 Red Hat Ecosystem Innovation Award as well as the North American Hybrid Cloud Everywhere honorable mention. These awards highlight partners whose collaboration with Red Hat delivers measurable customer outcomes through open, enterprise-grade platforms.
As AI moves from pilot projects to production systems, the challenge shifts from building models to operating them with consistent identity, governance, and security through integration with Microsoft Azure services.
At the center of this recognition is Banco Bradesco, one of the largest financial institutions in Latin America. Operating at massive scale with strict regulatory and security requirements, Banco Bradesco has moved beyond AI experimentation to production by building on Azure Red Hat OpenShift.
Azure Red Hat OpenShift serves as the secure-focused, scalable foundation for Banco Bradesco’s enterprise AI platform, unifying governance across more than 200 AI initiatives through integration with Azure identity, security, and policy capabilities. This is production AI on a jointly supported, enterprise-ready platform, not a proof of concept.
Beyond large-scale financial institutions like Banco Bradesco, Topicus demonstrates how this approach applies across regional lenders and regulated markets. Its Akkuro lending platform runs on Azure Red Hat OpenShift, providing a consistent, enterprise Kubernetes foundation for document-driven credit decisioning in regulated environments.
By deploying in Switzerland North, Topicus keeps financial data in-country to meet sovereignty requirements and maintains a repeatable deployment model across regions. Built on a fully managed service jointly operated by Microsoft and Red Hat, Akkuro allows lenders to scale document intelligence workflows and maintain compliance and operational control.
Customers are increasingly seeking a single platform to run applications and AI, with a consistent application environment integrated with Azure AI and governance services.
Platform advancements across modernization, security, and AI
Azure Red Hat OpenShift provides a consistent, enterprise-ready foundation for running applications and AI at scale. The latest advancements focus on four priority areas:
- Modernization
- Security
- AI innovation
- Global expansion
Customers don’t just need features—they need to trust the platform running their most critical workloads. That’s what Microsoft and Red Hat delivers through Azure Red Hat OpenShift: a jointly engineered, enterprise-ready foundation.
—Aaron Isom, Technical Cloud Strategist, Red Hat
Migrate and modernization with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization
For many enterprises, the immediate priority is migrating off legacy virtualization platforms without disrupting existing workloads. Enterprises are evaluating options to move off legacy virtualization platforms while maintaining flexibility in how and when to modernize. OpenShift Virtualization on Azure Red Hat OpenShift allows virtual machines and containers to run side-by-side on a single managed platform.
This provides a practical path to migrate existing workloads without rearchitecting and transition those workloads to Kubernetes over time. Integrated RHEL entitlements and Azure Hybrid Benefit eligibility further simplify licensing during modernization.
Securing workloads on Azure Red Hat OpenShift
As sensitive applications and data move to the cloud, enterprises need to trust that their most sensitive workloads can run securely across regions while meeting strict regulatory and sovereignty requirements. Azure Red Hat OpenShift applies a Zero Trust approach with built-in identity and confidential computing capabilities to enable that trust.
Confidential Containers on Azure Red Hat OpenShift protect sensitive data in use through hardware‑backed isolation, enabling secure processing of regulated workloads without exposing plaintext data to the underlying infrastructure.
Managed Identities and Workload Identities on Azure Red Hat OpenShift is generally available, standardizing credential management across both platform operations and application workloads.
At the platform layer, Azure Red Hat OpenShift operators use scoped, user assigned managed identities aligned with Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC). At the application layer, workload identity provides secure access to Azure services through OpenID Connect (OIDC) federation, eliminating the need for long-lived secrets embedded in code or configuration.
As environments scale, managing credentials manually introduces operational overhead and security risk. Adopting identity-based access reduces credential sprawl, improves security posture, and aligns with Zero Trust principles across distributed applications.
These capabilities reduce credential risk, strengthen security posture, and support compliance requirements in regulated industries.
AI innovation on Azure Red Hat OpenShift
Azure Red Hat OpenShift provides a consistent platform for running AI applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, with Azure delivering the AI, identity, and governance services needed to operationalize them.
Customers can run AI capabilities directly on Azure Red Hat OpenShift, using Red Hat OpenShift AI, or integrate with Azure AI services and Microsoft Foundry to accelerate development and scale.
Expanded NVIDIA GPU support enables large-scale inference and data-intensive workloads to run on a fully managed Red Hat OpenShift platform backed by Azure infrastructure.
Expanded regional availability
Where workloads run is as important as how they run. Data residency, sovereignty, and latency requirements often shape platform decisions, particularly in regulated industries.
Azure Red Hat OpenShift continues to expand globally, including recent availability in Mexico Central, New Zealand North, Malaysia West, and Indonesia Central and Austria East.
Modern applications and AI capabilities run closer to users and data, meeting local compliance requirements, and maintaining consistency across regions.
The bigger picture
Across virtualization, security, identity, AI infrastructure, and global expansion, these advancements show how enterprises are standardizing on a single platform for applications and AI at production scale. As AI becomes part of core business operations, consistency in governance, identity, and operational control is becoming a requirement for enterprise platforms.
For customers like Banco Bradesco, Azure Red Hat OpenShift powers production AI platforms that meet the demands of scale, security, and operational reliability.
We are bringing AI powered‑ banking to millions of Brazilians, so performance at scale is nonnegotiable. The developed solution gives us the speed and resilience to power AI-powered banking at scale. It is a reliable foundation.
—Rafael Romualdo Wandresen, Senior Bridge Manager, Banco Bradesco
Join Microsoft at Red Hat Summit 2026
See you at Red Hat Summit 2026. Stop by to connect with Microsoft and Red Hat and see how Azure Red Hat OpenShift supports VMware modernization and production AI workloads on a single platform, and how to get started on Azure.
