Article
University of Hawai'i Federal Credit Union
Elevates Their Enterprise to the Cloud
The Challenge
Facing ever-increasing cybersecurity threats, business continuity demands, and growing member expectations, University of Hawai’i Federal Credit Union’s (UHFCU) leaders made a thoughtful decision to relocate the enterprise applications they hosted on the islands – including cash flow management; Check 21 processing; print servers; authentication; log management and reporting; interactive voice response; and document imaging – into the cloud to improve disaster recovery, security, and compliance.
At the same time, they wanted to free up more of its valuable IT team time to work on strategic and member-centric initiatives, just as they were able to do when they migrated their KeyStone core platform to the SwitchThink Solutions Cloud. Public cloud providers (Azure, AWS, Google) were an option, but they couldn’t eliminate the IT team’s responsibility to secure, maintain, and operate the applications hosted there.
Public clouds also require the use of proprietary tools to conduct daily maintenance and operational activities. This meant the IT team would have to train and maintain specialized resources. UHFCU needed a better solution to reduce their IT team burdens.
The Solution
UHFCU chose to leverage SwitchThink’s cloud environment and operational expertise to manage its enterprise applications. We provisioned and configured the devices to meet UHFCU’s needs and secured them in our world-class data centers. The migration was completed more quickly and easily than any public cloud option because the SwitchThink Cloud is ready-built to meet credit union compliance and security requirements “out of the box”, and there are no specialized tools for the credit union to learn.
SwitchThink also allows credit union leaders to choose the types of daily infrastructure management and operations responsibility to shift to us. UHFCU selected a fully managed services model to maximize the time their IT team could reallocate to other projects.
Employees can’t be tied up keeping the lights on instead of serving members. Having SwitchThink as a trusted partner has helped us offer members state-of-the-art banking and convenience.
The Results
Since implementing, UHFCU has improved its disaster recovery, security and compliance posture; simplified the daily management of their environment; reduced vendor and infrastructure management costs by aggregating services in the hands of a single, trusted partner; and improved their bottom line. UHFCU’s enterprise applications now receive the same security, backup and recovery, compliance, and service level agreements as their KeyStone core (also housed in the SwitchThink Cloud) at a fraction of what public clouds charge for significantly less service. And they are protected against the potential for runaway costs common with other clouds thanks to SwitchThink’s simple, easy-to-budget pricing.
UHFCU is also reaping the continuous benefit of access to cloud and industry experts for help with both application and operational best practice implementation and third-party incident management. The value UHFCU receives will continue to grow. SwitchThink constantly evaluates and implements new technology to ensure best-in-class performance and to further secure our clients. For example, a recently added technology protects UHFCU from ransomware attacks, an investment that would have been cost prohibitive for the credit union alone.
Most importantly, UHFCU has successfully increased the amount of their tech teams’ time dedicated to more rewarding work that helps the credit union grow and be recognized as a best credit union locally and nationally.
About University of Hawai'i FCU
Celebrating over 60 years of service, UHFCU is a federally chartered credit union with over $800 million in assets that serves nearly 33,000 faculty, staff, students, and alumni association members of the University of Hawaii system statewide. It was named a finalist for “Hawai’I’s Best” by the Star-Advertiser as well as “Best Bank” by University of Hawaii students and is looking forward to serving the University system for years to come.
UHFCU’s main office is located at 2019 S. King Street (at the corner of McCully and King), with additional branches on the UH Mānoa Campus, UH West Oahu campus, and Leahi Hospital. It also provides access to members at over 50 Shared Branch locations and more than 375 surcharge-free ATMs throughout Hawai’i. Learn more at www.uhfcu.com.