VSHN Wins Red Hat Partner Award 2025 for Platform Modernization

On March 10, 2026, at the Red Hat Switzerland Partner Day 2026 in Zurich, VSHN AG received the Red Hat Partner Award 2025 for “Platform Modernization of the Year.”

The award recognizes VSHN’s joint work with Health Info Net AG (HIN) to modernize one of the most important digital infrastructures in the Swiss healthcare ecosystem.

Supporting the backbone of digital healthcare

For almost thirty years, HIN has been at the forefront of digitalizing Swiss healthcare. The organization provides secure digital services such as encrypted @hin.ch email addresses for healthcare professionals and organizations including doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, and authorities across Switzerland.

Today, more than 50,000 healthcare professionals rely on HIN services, and the network connects over 90% of relevant actors in the Swiss healthcare system. This makes HIN an essential part of the country’s healthcare communication ecosystem.

Operating such a platform requires the highest standards of security, reliability, and scalability, as sensitive healthcare data and critical communication depend on it.

Building on a proven foundation

As HIN’s digital services continued to evolve, the underlying infrastructure increasingly reflected an earlier stage in the organization’s technical development. The existing environment, built around dedicated physical servers and long-term provider relationships, had proven reliable over many years.

At the same time, HIN saw the opportunity to complement this stable foundation with greater flexibility, standardization, and modern operating models.

To address this, HIN launched Project Phoenix – an initiative inspired by the principles of The Phoenix Project book – with the goal of reinventing its IT infrastructure and enabling a more agile and resilient organization.

The guiding principles of the project included:

• GitOps and traceability, enabling a single, well-managed source of truth for configuration and infrastructure changes
• A dual-vendor strategy to avoid vendor lock-in across infrastructure layers
• A security-first architecture prioritizing privacy, compliance, and data protection
• Standardization and scalability through open technologies
• Automation and iterative improvement to increase operational efficiency
• Faster time-to-market for new digital healthcare services

A strategically important part of the transformation is the planned implementation of the Secure Swiss Health Network (SSHN) based on the SCION Internet architecture, a next-generation networking architecture designed to provide highly available and secure communication paths.

A cloud-native platform for the future

To bring this vision to life, HIN partnered with VSHN to design and deploy a modern cloud-native platform.

The platform is built on Red Hat OpenShift, a Kubernetes-based container platform that enables scalable application deployment and modern DevOps workflows.

An important aspect of the platform architecture is a modern security approach based on the principles of Zero Trust and Defense in Depth. Unlike traditional perimeter-based network security models that rely primarily on a central firewall, a Zero Trust approach leads to much stronger network microsegmentation and therefore a more distributed security model.

At HIN, the infrastructure is separated into public and private environments, while the private networks are further segmented wherever possible using Kubernetes Network Policies.

This layered security architecture means that a potential attacker would first have to bypass multiple protection layers and then authenticate across different components using mechanisms such as OIDC or certificates. Even in the unlikely event of a successful breach, segmentation ensures that access would be limited to a specific zone rather than the entire platform.

To ensure long-term flexibility and avoid dependence on a single provider, the platform follows a dual-vendor cloud strategy and runs across two European cloud providers:

• cloudscale.ch, a Swiss cloud provider specializing in sovereign infrastructure
• Exoscale, a European cloud provider with data centers across Europe and strong privacy and compliance standards

This architecture allows HIN to operate a modern platform while maintaining independence and long-term flexibility in its infrastructure choices.

The results

The platform transformation delivered several important improvements for HIN:

• Rapid deployment and scalability for applications
• Enhanced security and compliance aligned with Swiss healthcare regulations
• Operational efficiency through automation and reduced manual processes
• A cultural shift toward DevOps, enabling continuous improvement and innovation

By combining cloud-native technologies with strong security and compliance principles, HIN is now well positioned to support the evolving needs of the Swiss healthcare sector.

Recognition from Red Hat

The Red Hat Partner Award for Platform Modernization of the Year recognizes projects that demonstrate how open technologies and modern platforms can successfully transform critical IT environments.

At the event in Zurich, Red Hat recognized several Swiss and international partners for projects implemented using Red Hat technologies across areas such as automation, hybrid cloud, virtualization, and platform modernization.

Receiving this award together with HIN highlights the impact that modern DevOps practices and open platforms can have in sectors where security, trust, and reliability are essential.

A strong ecosystem

Projects of this scale are only possible through collaboration. The modernization of HIN’s platform brought together technology providers, cloud infrastructure partners, and platform engineering expertise.

The project is also an example of the Open Sovereign ecosystem, where organizations collaborate to build secure, open, and sovereign digital infrastructure for critical sectors such as healthcare.

Want to learn more?

If you would like to explore the project in more detail, read the full HIN success story, where we explain the platform architecture, transformation journey, and collaboration behind the modernization of Switzerland’s healthcare communication infrastructure.

👉 Read our Success Story with HIN

Thank you

A big thank you to the teams at HIN, Red Hat, and everyone involved in this project.

We are proud to support platforms that play such an important role in Switzerland’s digital infrastructure and look forward to continuing this journey together.