Red Hat today announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift have been selected by Urssaf as the standard platforms for modernising its information system. These technologies support the IT department's cloud transformation of its practices to fund the French social protection model.

Urssaf is responsible for collecting social security contributions and redistributing them nationwide. In 2025, the organisation collected nearly 602 billion euros from 12 million employers and entrepreneurs, which was redistributed to more than 800 social protection organisations and agencies.

"Urssaf’s mission demands operational stability, digital sovereignty and equity among all economic entities and stakeholders. Standardising our infrastructure on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift gives us the platform stability required to process 602 billion euros annually while safeguarding citizen data. This open source model limits the reliance on a single vendor and allows us to maintain strict local architectural control and local governance over our operations," explained Jean-Baptiste Courouble, CIO, Urssaf.

A secure and open infrastructure for digital sovereignty

To maintain control over citizen data and meet regulatory requirements, the infrastructure is deployed in an isolated "air-gapped" private environment, without dependence on a public cloud.

By using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift, Urssaf has an open, standardised and interoperable platform designed to support the long-term evolution of its information system and meet the sovereignty requirements of the public sector. This approach also provides a standard and secure infrastructure while limiting dependence on a single vendor through enterprise open source technologies.

Today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the operating system for more than 27,000 virtualised servers running the organisation's main transactional applications.Red Hat Directory Server manages Urssaf's directories and identity management.

This standardisation helps to increase the security, resilience and reliability of the organisation's critical applications.

A cloud-native platform to modernise IT applications

Driven by the IT department's cloud-first strategy for application modernisation, Urssaf's internal cloud, powered by Red Hat OpenShift, uses an open and standard infrastructure to manage its containerised applications in a microservices architecture. It hosts several critical

digital services for users and social protection partners, with performance reaching 2 billion API calls per month and 5,000 transactions per second at peak.

This infrastructure helps ensure the continuous availability of digital services while providing more flexibility to evolve applications, such as integrating future AI capabilities to meet the changing needs of internal users and citizens.

“Safeguarding critical citizen data and providing non-stop service availability are core priorities for managing national infrastructures. By having its cloud and AI lifecycle on Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud platforms, Urssaf is shaping its own destiny while maintaining continuous system availability and scaling vital public services with confidence.

‘’This repeatable public sector blueprint highlights how highly regulated organisations can scale digital services while safeguarding public trust, sovereignty and self-reliance,” concluded Rémy Mandon, country manager, Red Hat France.