TwinStar Credit Union Enhances Banking Experience with Nutanix

TwinStar Credit Union Ensures Members a Superior Banking Experience with Nutanix

Overview

Since 1938, TwinStar Credit Union has focused on helping its members realize their financial dreams. Serving customers throughout the Pacific Northwest, TwinStar offers a variety of personal and business banking services, as well as loan and credit card offerings. When its on-premises compute and infrastructure platforms began to consume more time and resources, the credit union migrated to a Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure, together with Nutanix Files. The new solution reduced administrative and configuration issues by approximately 50 percent. Now the TwinStar team can spend less time focusing on keeping its network and applications running, and more time rolling out new digital banking initiatives.

Challenge

TwinStar Credit Union is focused on providing a customer-centric experience to its members, and its network infrastructure is the platform that makes its banking services possible. When its aging on-premises storage systems began to experience performance issues, its IT team understood that the firm would have to make a change before the limitations impacted members.

“We're responsible for the financial health of 140,000 people, and when they show up at an ATM, they had better be able to get their money,” said Brian Tallon, Vice President, Information Technology, TwinStar Credit Union. “Our infrastructure and applications have to be up, running, and performing well, but our old system was not getting that done anymore.”

Maintaining the solution was also beginning to strain the credit union’s limited IT resources. “Our existing system required a great deal of maintenance, which took up a considerable amount of time,” said Tallon. “Our on-premises storage platform took days to update.”

The solution would need to support a wide variety of cloud and on-premises applications, while providing robust security to meet regulatory requirements.

“As a financial institution, we are very highly regulated, and we need to comply with state and federal regulatory bodies,” said Tallon. “Security factors into everything we do here, and we have a dedicated InfoSec team to safeguard our data.

Solution

After considering several options, TwinStar migrated its separate on-premises infrastructure and storage to the Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure. To support its storage, the firm eliminated its on-premises platform and moved to Nutanix Files Storage for simplified, automated file management.

“Our duty to our members is to spend our money wisely and get the best value that we can get, and Nutanix provided the best value for the price,” said Tallon. “We’re Nutanix for our compute functions and for storage—it's basically our infrastructure backbone. We have more than 200 applications that employees use, both in the cloud and on-premises, and Nutanix provides a robust platform to support them.”

Nutanix interacts smoothly with the Jack Henry and Associates software that TwinStar uses for its core banking functions.

“Most everything on Nutanix talks to the Jack Henry service, including middleware platforms, SQL databases, and other systems and processes,” said Tallon.  “We host our data warehouse on Nutanix and Jack Henry feeds literally everything.” 

Customer Outcome

By consolidating its separate services onto a single platform, TwinStar has saved significant time on management and troubleshooting. The Nutanix Files storage solution also helps the organization automate time-consuming storage tasks, and scale its solution easily when needs change. 

“Administration is much easier, especially when it comes to the backup windows for different servers and services.” said Tallon. “Furthermore, since we’ve deployed Nutanix, the amount of trouble tickets related to compute-related issues has dropped by 50 percent.”

With less time spent configuring backups and chasing down issues, the TwinStar team now has more time to focus on providing a better experience for members. 

“We recently launched a brand-new digital banking platform that our team was heavily involved in,” said Tallon. “That's been a project that's been in the works for quite a long time, and it would not have been possible if we had been busy providing support for the older system.”

Meeting regulatory obligations is easier as well, thanks to the integrated security and the full visibility and reporting capabilities provided by the Nutanix Prism management solution.

“We obviously need to create performance metric reports to show auditors that we are monitoring and maintaining our systems,” said Tallon. “With Nutanix Prism, the amount of work it takes to do that has been significantly reduced. The platform also provides encryption at rest, which is a capability that was not offered on our old platform.”

Tallon also appreciates the technical assistance provided by the Nutanix Support team. 

“One of the things we love most about Nutanix is that when we need support, it's outstanding,” said Tallon. “We get the help we need right away, and it’s a five-star experience each and every time.” 

Next Steps

With its flexible Nutanix solution in place, TwinStar’s IT team has begun exploring options to further enhance its end-user experience, as well as further strengthen security for an evolving threat landscape. The company is evaluating Nutanix Frame to empower employees with Desktop-as-a-Service access to the tools and services they need every day.

“The primary advantage of Frame will be its improved security,” said Tallon. “Our back office functions are a hundred percent remote now. More than 300 employees have laptops that are able to access our data. Frame will enable us to have all these sensitive applications running on Frame, rather than on a laptop on a home network. We also expect Frame to reduce our need for VPN, making user support easier.”