Keeping Client Assets Secure and Available
Member Business Financial Services, LLC (“MBFS”) is a Credit Union Service Organization. MBFS assists credit unions to fund business loans within their markets in order to meet the strategic goals for their organization. The CUSO provide credit analysis, loan document preparation, relationship management, and loan servicing for credit unions as deemed prudent by our Board of Directors and in the best interests of Member Business Financial Services and our credit union partners.
Challenges
IT services and internal infrastructure needed improvement to maintain member satisfaction. The IT services at the time were provided by a member credit union. MBFS felt like they were not a top priority, which led to concerns about the completeness and accuracy of services as they were provided by the IT group. Additionally, they had a business disaster recovery solution that could not pass a recovery test.
While looking to address these performance concerns, it became clear to MBFS that the service provider was not demonstrating a relationship that looked out for the best interests of MBFS.
Security issues were also a concern. MBFS as a financial organization needs to be vigilante regarding protection of data assets.
So to summarize, the challenge areas included:
- reliability, stability, and performance of the IT platforms
- need an IT organization to meet the service levels of number 1 but also provide strategic insights for IT to optimize and differentiate
- security
Solutions
Weidenhammer designed and architected a suite of solutions assembled to address the needs found in discovery. These included crafting solutions that include architectural and technology changes, implementation, and access to compute and storage resources from Weidenhammer’s data center.
Weidenhammer also addressed their security concerns. MBFS has reduced the risk of a security situation by bolstering their perimeter barriers, but also by providing to the organization the ability to see and monitor behaviors on the network, allowing a more proactive approach to security controls.
In addition, a backup and recovery strategy was employed, along with a planned execution of patching to all user PCs.
Results
MBFS has moved to a service provider whose only role is platform technical support. Weidenhammer has become the IT team responsible for security, performance, and operational resilience of the technology platforms. The results are measured by many fewer IT related emergencies, better throughput on the network or systems, providing comfort that a failure can be quickly recovered and security issues are better able to be prevented and mitigated. MBFS also has access to a broader skill set of IT personnel and experienced end user support resources, resulting in a better user experience and improved workforce productivity.
