Building your secure cloud blueprint

Publisher’s Note: CUInsight is hosting a free webinar Wednesday, July 28th titled, “CU Cloud Champions – CIOs building blueprints and gaining buy in for secure cloud strategies”. We hope you’ll join us! Register here.

Leaders who were once non-committal to preventative risk management are eager to assess and reevaluate policies and capabilities to ensure protection and effective response in the future. This change of heart comes after last year battling a global health pandemic that fundamentally changed the way we live, work, and do business, with cyber breaches that seemed to occur more frequently and on a larger scale than ever before. 

For credit unions once apprehensive about converting to the cloud, we are seeing a rapidly growing demand for strategies leveraging the cloud to bolster disaster recovery capabilities, compliance, and productivity. Though still behind banks and fintechs whose capabilities offer increased speed of service and improved member experiences, credit unions are understanding the benefits of the cloud. 

The cloud enables a better cybersecurity platform, providing more visibility of activity across all servers and vendors. Additionally, the cloud can be leveraged  to address specific business challenges. It allows for faster onboarding of new vendors and/or employees as well as faster implementation of new products that could offer a new feature for members. 

“Some of the main benefits of working with AWS and Think|Stack include the speed of deployment, enhanced DR, and the ability to focus on application support,” shares Chris Eden, VP of information security & technology, People’s Credit Union.

Through panel discussions and roundtables over the past year with AWS and several credit unions, we’ve gained further insight into the industry. What we have found is that both credit unions in the cloud and credit unions curious about the cloud have the same challenge of not knowing how to get there. Leaders want to see a clear path for securely and effectively transitioning to the cloud while protecting critical data and limiting impact to day-to-day operations. 

In the past, all companies would transition their infrastructure to the new, updated hardware without much tangible change. With cloud-native services, however, the cloud enables access to data internally in ways businesses didn’t have before and enables agility so that organizations can try something new for its membership in a fast and efficient way. 

There is a misconception that the cloud is challenging to use, but in reality, it simply requires a new skillset. The current workforce is not deep with tech professionals experienced in working in the cloud, so leaders are left uninformed of the opportunity and process for migration and implementation.

In working with credit union technology leaders, and major vendors like Amazon Web Services (AWS) for over 15 years, we have been able to build and offer a set of guidelines – a blueprint for secure digital cloud transformation. These principles include: 

• Developing skills for you and your team to lead secure cloud transformations
• Where to start – building a pathway for your credit union 
• Gaining buy-in from leadership, boards and teams 
• Leveraging vendors and partners to help along your journey 

Considering what the impact may be on the credit union industry if it doesn’t adopt new technologies, education is the key to helping credit unions understand how the cloud can help solve real-world business challenges and the ease of adoption. We are working with the industry to bridge the gap between the advanced capabilities of the big banks with machine learning and AI, and credit unions that are only now considering a transition to a secure cloud solution.  

While the COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone to think differently about how they live and do business, one of the most exciting outcomes is the progress credit unions have seen in their digital transformation journeys resulting in tremendous opportunities to leverage technology capabilities and modernize their member experience.

Don’t forget to join CUInsight and Think|Stack for our free webinar titled “CU Cloud Champions – CIOs building blueprints and gaining buy in for secure cloud strategies”, on Wednesday, July 28th. Register yourself and a colleague here.