Red Hat, Inc. 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.