The advancement of cloud technology is helping to drive digital transformation in Credit Unions - leading to innovation and competitive advantage. However, many Credit Unions are not realising the benefits promised by cloud.
In this blog, our ITMS Manager Andrew Higgs outlines 5 of the key benefits that cloud hosting can bring to your Credit Union.
1. Enhanced performance
When you use a physical server, it can be under resourced and not perform as well as it should. Cloud hosting has flexible resources and allows for a balance of the load across multiple virtual servers. This results in faster reporting on any one server and better user experience for everyone involved.
We continue to monitor resource usage and invest in our platform so that it’s always running on the latest and best hardware.
2. Scalability
This is another key advantage of cloud hosting over physical servers. Hosting in the cloud allows your environment to continue to grow across multiple virtual servers which provide scalable resources and capacity.
Your business will continue to grow and our core platform, Scion, will grow with it. With our monitoring and reporting, we’re always looking at performance so we can adapt as needed, whether that’s provisioning more CPUs, more disc space, more memory – with just a few clicks.
We adjust the resources as and when required, customised to the exact needs of your Credit Union.
This also allows us to deploy new upgrades or products much quicker through our Shared Services Infrastructure (read more about that here).
3. Reduced costs
Cloud hosting removes the need for you to buy, resource and maintain your own hardware to host your banking solution. This can cost a lot of money for your Credit Union and can be time consuming for your IT team.
Hosting virtual servers in the Cloud is much more cost-effective. As mentioned previously, the ease with which you can scale up or down means you don’t have to pay for unused capacity. You only pay for what you require.
Because Scion is hosted in the Cloud on virtual machines, this means less power and hardware is required, reducing your carbon footprint too!
4. Business Continuity Planning (BCP)
Business Continuity Planning is much easier in the Cloud, as we are already using a multi-server hosting architecture complete with redundant features such as power and comms.
System faults and problems are resolved much quicker when Scion is hosted in the Cloud because we have additional monitoring and direct control over the Database, VMs and host environments. This combined with our monitoring and shared services support, means we’re able to react quicker and resolve issues without the input form 3rd party suppliers.
We also perform regular tested failovers between primary and secondary servers, locally hosted backups and a Disaster Recovery service.
5. Security
This is a big one. Some people feel the “cloud” is a mysterious wisp of nothingness and can be easily hacked into.
But you need to remember, datacentres (where these servers are hosted) are physical places with the highest security measures; security controlled access, authorised passes, individual permissions, locked cabinets, state-of-the-art firewalls – the list goes on!
So your mind can be at ease knowing Scion is hosted in the Cloud.
Check out this short video of our ITMS Manager Andrew Higgs visiting one of our datacentres and see for yourself how the datacentres look.
As you can see there are some serious advantages to cloud hosting, particularly for those who demand scalability, control, and performance at a value-based price!
Want to know more about our Cloud Hosting option for your Credit Union? Register your interest below:
