Established in 1922, People’s Credit Union is a nonprofit, full-service financial institution with six locations throughout Rhode Island. The credit union operates with a people-first mission across all facets of its organization, including how it approaches IT modernization.
When faced with aging data center hardware, People’s Credit Union IT team decided to
bypass further investment in physical assets and instead looked to modernize with a
cloud solution. “We didn’t feel that managing infrastructure needed to be an internal
core competency. We also recognized the challenge in finding, training, and retaining
talented technical staff,” explains Sean Daly, CEO, People’s Credit Union.
Another challenge was a backup data center located 13 miles away from the primary operational data center. Because the credit union’s Rhode Island location was prone to frequent storms and other weather-related challenges, leadership recognized that a natural disaster could impact not just their primary site, but also its secondary backup site. The credit union wanted to use its move to the cloud to increase its resiliency and time to recovery (RTO). The credit union also recognized an opportunity to address a long[1]held desire to move IT staff away from infrastructure management to focus more on application management. The shift would allow People’s Credit Union to maximize the value of all applications, with benefits for members and the organization.
“We have enhanced our DR strategy to benefit from AWS Availability Zones which gives us much more resiliency than we could do on our own.”
- Christopher Eden, VP Information Security & Technology, People’s Credit Union
People’s Credit Union wanted an implementation partner to help accelerate its cloud journey. An RFP led the organization to select Think|Stack, a Maryland-based Credit Union Service Organization (CUSO) with a team of technology and cybersecurity experts. “We found Think|Stack and they introduced us to the AWS Cloud. And that’s when we decided to go all in—move all our servers off-prem and put them all in AWS,” says Christopher Eden, VP of Information Security & Technology, People’s Credit Union.
The partner worked closely with the credit union’s IT team to develop a clear migration roadmap, addressing aging systems, security threats, and offsite data storage requirements. In just under six months, Think|Stack helped People’s Credit Union fully migrate all servers to AWS.
With an AWS-based infrastructure in place, People’s Credit Union was able to immediately take advantage of additional cloud services. For example, the credit union adopted end-user computing solutions like Amazon WorkSpaces to transition its workforce to remote work. “It was a significant change to our organization in a very quick period of time. We had everyone remote in less than two weeks. If we’d had to deal with server infrastructure of our old data center on top of that, it would have impacted our timing on getting everyone up and running at home,” recalls Daly
To learn more visit: https://partners.amazonaws.com/partners/001E000001Kb4SmIAJ/Think%20Stack
Founded in 2011 as a family-owned company, Think|Stack provides technology and cybersecurity expertise in financial services. Designated as a credit union service organization in 2021, Think|Stack emphasizes education and comanagement in the optimization of its technology solutions
The People's Credit Union began in 1992 and is proud of its "people helping people" mantra. Headquartered in Rhode Island, People's CU has grown to 115 employees serving over 40,000 members at 6 locations and $600 million in assets. It offers a broad range of financial services to its members while emphasizing its local hometown focus.
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