Benefits of the Cloud

Once credit unions have a complete understanding of the public cloud and its capabilities, the benefits of migration become readily apparent. From accessibility to security, institutions hosting their IT infrastructure in the public cloud will experience:

Security and Compliance: A secure, cloud-based infrastructure ensures compliance with regulatory requirements through proper configuration and security measures, providing institutions with peace of mind during daily operations and audits. By partnering with a public cloud provider, many compliance challenges and responsibilities are outsourced, allowing credit unions to utilize a provider's established compliance framework. Additionally, most trusted public cloud providers have invested large amounts of capital in security measures that would be unattainable and unsustainable for most organizations maintaining their infrastructure onsite.
Scalability: If it's relying on physical servers, a credit union must anticipate future needs and scale operations to that fixed perception. By migrating IT infrastructure to the public cloud, institutions can start with what is needed and scale accordingly, which yields greater flexibility, agility and potential cost savings. A migration to the public cloud enables credit unions to effortlessly add more resources to their environment while enjoying cost efficiencies from the scale.
Cost Efficiencies: Out of necessity, many credit unions buy as much infrastructure as its budget allows. This practice results in waste if the institution only uses a portion of the infrastructure purchased. With the public cloud, a credit union can purchase exactly what it needs at any given time and expand its infrastructure to support business growth when necessary. The potential cost savings extend to include all the benefits of a large environment, including built-in redundancy, availability and disaster recovery capabilities—allowing credit unions to reap the benefits of a managed IT environment without bearing the entirety of the expense.
Highly Available: With a highly available infrastructure in the public cloud, a credit union will have a resilient and redundant IT environment. Even if a single server malfunctions, the redundancy of operations offered by the public cloud allow another piece of hardware to take control without negatively affecting the member experience.
Agility: The public cloud also allows for easy incorporation of new services for members, increasing speed to market compared to other service delivery methods. With on-premise servers, a credit union could face weeks or months of waiting for hardware, installation and licensing before deploying a new service. However, a cloud-based infrastructure can launch the same service within hours or days.
Accessibility: The public cloud is readily accessible, which presents a valuable benefit for credit unions managing a remote workforce. Institutions can use an increasing range of high-speed connectivity options to interact with cloud-based resources. With proper controls, these dispersed connectivity options become an extension of the institution's private network as well.

Moving Forward With the Cloud

When determining when or if a cloud migration is the right move, there are several steps a credit union should take to save time and money. Reviewing technology annually and determining if a cloud version of an application exists is a helpful exercise. For example, an organization can move one step closer to a full migration by simply deploying Office 365.

Instant Insights /

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