Skip to main content

Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine Teams with Red Hat to Create Real-Time Machine Learning Platform to Digitize Grant Application and Payment Processing for Farmers

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Government of Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) has developed a real-time machine learning text analysis platform using Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies to serve more than 120,000 farmers in Ireland.

DAFM leads, develops, and regulates Ireland’s agrifood sector, which receives more than 130,000 grant applications from farmers and their agents each year and issues more than €1 billion of payments through its Basic Payment System (BPS). Its applications often include Personally Sensitive Information (PSI), which means DAFM places a high priority on security to protect that information.

Developers from DAFM worked with Red Hat Consulting and public and private IT service provider Version 1 to develop a machine learning solution, SmartText, to replace its manual grant application processes and improve compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The platform uses real-time machine learning (ML) capabilities, optical character recognition, text analytics and natural language processing to scan documents and images for sensitive information. When SmartText identifies a potential data privacy breach, access to the document is limited to authorized DAFM individuals who can review the content and take corrective action.

To meet GDPR requirements for data ownership, DAFM deployed SmartText on Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, on-premises in its datacenter. With integrated DevOps capabilities, OpenShift has enabled DAFM to take SmartText from a proof of concept to production in a matter of weeks, has reduced the time it takes to develop new features from weeks to days, and also provides a common platform for applications to be managed and scaled across the department. DAFM is also using Red Hat 3scale API Management to manage access to SmartText APIs, which is critical for both security and compliance, and to connect the platform to its citizen-facing application.

Finding an enterprise open source solution was a key consideration for DAFM, which would bring standards-based technologies that could be better tailored to its specific needs, and which could also provide strong security capabilities. DAFM and its developers were already users of open source and saw the culture of collaboration and sharing that comes with open source as an important part of the project.

With intelligent, automated scanning of funding grant application documents, SmartText has helped DAFM increase overall confidence in the system while improving GDPR compliance, protecting sensitive data from unauthorized access and reducing the time spent on manual administration and management of grant applications. Now, DAFM can focus on reviewing grants and proactively discovering, designing, and applying new ML models to meet internal and customer needs. Using Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies, DAFM has created a fully digital application process, giving farmers and their agents the ability to upload documents and easily check the status of their application.

Supporting Quotes

Keith Lynch, country manager, Ireland, Red Hat
“Powering the complex infrastructure behind the Basic Payment System requires a solution that’s simultaneously open and more secure. With an open hybrid cloud foundation provided by Red Hat, DAFM has the flexibility of the cloud and the security of keeping data on-premises. The department has developed a scalable service which helps meet GDPR regulations whilst also improving and digitalizing the grant application process for Ireland’s farmers and their agents.”

Gareth Sheerin, enterprise architect, Irish Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
“Being able to rely on Red Hat Consulting to help us bring the best of breed applications into production is very important and with it, they bring a culture of sharing and learning that we find invaluable. Red Hat has enabled us to get applications and features into production incredibly quickly compared to what we could deliver prior to introducing the platform, which means we’re helping make sure that the Department’s work will be able to serve Ireland’s farmers for many years to come.”

Additional Resources

Connect with Red Hat

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. Red Hat helps customers integrate new and existing IT applications, develop cloud-native applications, standardize on our industry-leading operating system, and automate, secure, and manage complex environments. Award-winning support, training, and consulting services make Red Hat a trusted adviser to the Fortune 500. As a strategic partner to cloud providers, system integrators, application vendors, customers, and open source communities, Red Hat can help organizations prepare for the digital future.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company's views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company or its parent International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE:IBM) may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company's views as of any date subsequent to the date of this press release.

Red Hat, the Red Hat logo, and OpenShift are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries.

Contacts:

Gaby Berkman
Red Hat, Inc.
gberkman@redhat.com
802-318-5682

Data & News supplied by www.cloudquote.io
Stock quotes supplied by Barchart
Quotes delayed at least 20 minutes.
By accessing this page, you agree to the following
Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions.