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nvisia + Landmark Credit Union

Case Study

Landmark Credit Union - Banking Made Easy

Sustainable cloud native DevSecOps in three months

Cloud platform modernization delivers speed, security, and compliance to Landmark Credit Union.

It's one thing to "lift and shift" to the cloud. Taking advantage of cloud-native features and optimizing for microservices or containers is another. It's daunting, but an essential part of a high-performing digital enterprise.

Doing it in-house often leads to extended timelines, higher costs, and laborious processes prone to error. That is, unless you have the right partner, ready to meet you where you are and lead you on the journey to where you need to be.

Summary

Landmark Credit Union, a leading regional financial institution, was dependent on an array of off-the-shelf software solutions and applications that they wanted to move to the cloud and containerize. Creating new environments for each application was a slow-moving process. They needed to find a better way.                    

Together, we helped the Landmark team establish a custom-fit, standardized cloud platform (with hub-and-spoke architecture captured as infrastructure as code and automated with pipelines) by way of a nice little bit of IP we call Digital Foundations. In the end, we’re proud to say we significantly accelerated an effort that could otherwise have taken years – and set the client team up to never have to do it the “old” way again.

Results

Through a special combination of experience and IP, nvisia platform architects and engineers guided our client to:

  • Align on their security and compliance requirements
  • Build a new best practice architecture, balancing innovation and corporate control
  • Train their infrastructure team on cloud native methods
  • Gain a real sense of understanding and ownership over the solution
  • Deliver their planned software projects to the new cloud environment swiftly and efficiently

In the end Landmark was set up with a new, consistent infrastructure, a team that was prepared to use it well, and peace of mind for leadership.

This was the legacy modernization we needed for our infrastructure team. We’re able to build environments quickly, which is great, but what’s more important to me is that we’ve got our patterns in place and when we release, we know it’s right.

Kyle Utley, CTO, Landmark Credit Union

The Full Scoop

The Challenge - Conquering the Mountain

Challenge

Facing the need to modernize their cloud platform processes and improve their security posture, Landmark leadership was looking to streamline their ability to develop, deploy, and maintain their applications. Like all financial institutions, Landmark Credit Union operates in a highly regulated space, dependent on multiple software solutions and at risk of cybersecurity attacks.

In addition, leading credit unions do a lot of custom development and place a premium on the experiences and products they provide to their customers. In other words, innovation is a big part of how they differentiate—whether that’s being easy to work with/navigate, providing superior access to unique products and services, or all of the above.

They need to be able to trust their platforms so they can deliver with velocity and at scale, avoid costly, frustrating rework, and support innovation.

The Approach - Growth Chart with a Magnifying Glass

Approach

With the familiarity and trust from previous partnerships with nvisia (we helped build some of their first custom applications), Landmark leadership brought us in initially as their full-stack development partner, working alongside their development teams to build and deliver early cloud applications, after some less-than-satisfying results from a traditional cloud partner. Over time as their cloud footprint grew, so did the need for a more sophisticated and standardized approach to operate in the cloud with higher degrees of security, flexibility, and stability.

Building that bit by bit was certainly not impossible, but it wasn’t going to be expedient. Considering that, along with Landmark’s need for platform stability and security, we presented Digital Foundations—essentially our collection of cloud-native DevSecOps learnings, expressed as code. Like a platform-in-a-box.

We were in a position to propose this solution because our cloud migration lead had been integrated with the client’s teams administering their cloud environments—we knew their pain points and understood where they were relative to where they wanted to go. And Digital Foundations would help them get there.

The Outcomes - Target with an Arrow at Bullseye

Outcomes

With the Landmark team looking to take a best practice hub-and-spoke approach with CAF landing zones in their cloud architecture, Digital Foundations helped support that innovation through spoke isolation and controlling the blast radius. And it also took the uncertain, multi-month task of adding new application environments and transformed it into a confident and consistent process taking only a few hours.

By combining infrastructure-as-code (IaC) with cloud native DevSecOps best practices, we were able to help Landmark achieve the standardization they sought while also improving their security profile and dramatically accelerating their ability to develop, deploy, and manage applications in the cloud.

Even more specifically, together with Landmark’s network and operations teams, we were able to build a fully operational platform and deploy their first app in just three months. Seriously, three months. All while training Landmark’s infrastructure team to learn and own their custom DevOps platform for themselves.

 

 

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