Challenge
A federal credit union in Midwestern U.S. was becoming increasingly uneasy about rising cyber threats. Eager to get out of the data center business, the credit union hoped to keep its small IT staff focused on building the business and keeping its membership happy.
Four key issues convinced credit union leadership that they needed a major IT overhaul:
- On-Premise data center: The credit union hosted its own core processing and member data in a small onsite space, but wanted to offload data center responsibilities to an external managed cloud service provider.
- Cyber security threats: The rising tide of headlines about serious data breaches motivated credit union leaders to seek a more robust security posture that accounted for compliance mandates.
- Headcount limitations: With a small IT staff, the credit union felt that it needed its technology people devoting much more of their time to core business issues.
- Insufficient disaster recovery: Credit union officials felt their nightly tape backup system was inadequate.
It was time to get the whole computing environment into the hands of a provider who dealt with custom-aligned hosting and continuity issues 24X7. It was time for the credit union to get out of the infrastructure and data center business.
Solution
Leveraging the due diligence and overarching support of OnX’s managed services experience and technology expertise. OnX helped the credit union data center transformation to a managed cloud was precisely systematic, point-by-point roadmapped, incrementally documented and ruggedly tested.
Moving the entire IT environment to OnX’s production hosting/data center, with backup and failover to a secondary facility on a different power grid, required considerable attention to detail. As part of this Zero Data Footprint solution, OnX provided four key deliverables:
- Cloud backup & disaster recovery: OnX backed up the credit union’s data to a cloud environment in an OnX data center. This process included testing for full data restoration and data recovery. OnX ensured that credit union officials could provide attestation to auditors that the interlocking elements of the new environment — especially disaster recovery — were meticulously configured and proven to work well.
- Production migration: Production systems (including ERS core processors on Linux) were virtualized in OnX’s managed cloud and mirrored to backup systems up via continuous replication.
- Email migration: Migrating to Office 365 provided a more centralized, secure email environment that eliminates the need for email to reside on local machines
- Secure LAN/WAN: Network upgrades included robust firewalls at all branch locations and the OnX hosting/data center. Featuring intrusion detection and prevention, this upgrade provides wireless access points that allow authorized mobile device access to the computing environment.
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Results
With OnX’s guidance, the Indiana credit union transformed its computing environment, gaining tremendous advances in redundancy/resiliency, scalability and overall business efficiency.
OnX’s Zero Data Footprint solution aligned perfectly with several of the credit union’s crucial business objectives — shrinking compliance distraction and freeing IT personnel to concentrate on serving the membership and waste far less time on ongoing technical headaches.
“By trusting in OnX and making this transition, we are a safer and more-secure company that can now really focus our internal resources on improving the member experience,” said the credit union’s CEO.
The CEO also noted that OnX’s managed cloud solution provides “the flexibility to make technology changes when desired without being handcuffed to a legacy platform or other technology investment.