>>Mhm >>Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards And I'm delighted to introduce our next guests. They are chris Saks Ceo of think stack and Michael Matthews President Ceo at mutual Credit Union. I'm your host for the cube Natalie. Ehrlich of course. And we're going to highlight the most impactful nonprofit partner award. Thank you gentlemen for joining the program. >>Thank you so much for having us. >>Terrific. Well delighted for you to be here. And Michael, I'd love to start with you. How did you figure out that cloud technology was critical to the future of mutual credit union? >>It's kind of by chance, Natalie, we're sitting down, we're looking at uh, racks of equipment in our I. T. Room and trying to keep everything up to date, um software updated, become a full time job and all of my staff and sat around and it come to a point where we were spending more time keeping upgrades, keeping servers upgraded. And we asked we reached out the things that they were a network provider at the time and we said, hey, whatever, what are our options? And they came back with several options and one of them was a W. S. And we explored it and uh we've not looked back. >>Terrific. Well, can you explain in further detail how you identified some of the gaps and what stood out to you about think stack, how this uh collaboration happened specifically? >>Well, some of the major gaps that you have is, you know, we're in Vicksburg Mississippi and I would say it's probably not the I. T mecca of the United States and staffing. What was a huge requirement for us if you're gonna make a move such as this, you've got to have the staffing and then along with the staffing is okay if you go out and we hire all these individuals to help help with this journey, are they going to become bored and you know, if we uh personally, if if I asked think stack, they would say, oh yes, don't do that hire us, but that's their job there, there there are parker vendor and so we went out, we asked other vendors that we use and what are the chances of us doing this and it was slim to none. And this type of technology you want, somebody who you can call and and all honesty, I want to be able to call chris and say chris, I'm having a problem versus, you know, one of my team called me and say we're having a problem, I'd rather call it and I love the vendor relationship. It has worked out well. Our major gaps in staffing though, Natalie >>what about staffing? >>That was our major gap. >>Oh God, it got it. Well, chris let's move on to you now. I'd love it if you could explain, you know, in some detail for our audience about the methodology of your company and also how you help your clients visualize their transformation processes. >>Yeah, for sure. Thanks Natalie. So we work with credit unions around the country and many of them are facing similar challenges to Michael at mutual. And in addition to staffing, they're often challenged with just the uncertain future of technology and that can include things like hurricanes, wildfires, various different disasters, pandemics and having to work remotely. But it also includes all of the opportunities that exist in transformative technologies for credit union. They need to keep pace with organizations like Robin Hood and stash and some of these other organizations that are providing cutting edge mobile apps and technology to their customers. And so how do you as an organization generally, that's a small nonprofit organization. How do you build the technology that will allow you to have a foundation to respond and react to whatever the world happens to throw actually, be that an opportunity to take advantage of for growth or some kind of risk from a cyber attack to a natural disaster. So what we try to do with our clients is take a very human centered approach first. And the idea behind that is to not walk in the door and talk about all the wonderful benefits of AWS or any other particular technology, but rather look at What do you expect. So if you take Michael, for example, you know, sitting down with him and trying to look out 10 years, what do you expect the industry to look like? What do you expect your organization to look like in? What goals do you have as a credit? You need to take advantage of those opportunities and to mitigate those risks. Once you identify those business needs, we can start looking at the humans that are involved in that experience. And so that would obviously be the employees and partners and vendors that support and make up the team at the credit union. And then obviously it's their current members and then any other members that they want to attract. And so you have to look at both sides of this. How how do you work securely efficiently? Um, as an employee on the flip side, how do you serve your members as well as you can serve them with cutting edge technology with technology that's always up and available. And then obviously with, with utmost security. So as we identify and build that picture, uh, we we generally do that with stick figures Natalie so we try to go in and and you know take um different personas and we use journey mapping and we use strategic foresight and various other exercise that help us uh literally paint a picture. Um and then from there we kind of back into that and say okay in order for you to accomplish these things into Have the organization that you want to have the next 10 years, what is your technology foundation and footprint need to look like to support that. And that's where we start to then back into that design which typically would include some type of public cloud services like AWS among other technologies from a cyber security perspective to build out that foundation and then allow them To respond and react to whatever the world throws at him over the next 10 years. >>Terrific. Well Michael would love to get your insight. How did you experience that human centered design focus, that think stack uh you know, is known for >>I think that's what says things take apart. You know, we there's numerous vendors you can go direct, there's there's plenty of software, there's plenty of technology out there you can buy. And as a credit union we can go out, we can just about get anything we wanted. But when we have a problem that we're trying to solve, it's not about that, it's about sitting down with chris his team and saying chris this this is a problem. We recently had one in password management, but we just this is a problem we're having. How do we solve this problem? And so the focus is not about trying to sell you another software. The focus is about solving the problem and having your staff and your team work more efficiently and effectively at their task. At the end of the day, you know, we're not arty people were in the financial service business. We rely on the solutions that we have to to help us do our jobs better and serve our members more effectively. >>Yeah, well, chris uh, you know, from your perspective, obviously human centered designed a really big component of your business, but what other key feature set your business apart from the competitive landscape? >>So I think the human centered design bleeds into another area that we really pride ourselves on, which is which is education and what I will call plain talk. So again, as Michael said, these organizations are our financial services, they're not technology experts, so you need to be able to communicate to those teams, those boards of directors, executive teams in a way that they can understand, and it can be uh somewhat difficult to talk about complex technical problems, um but when you boil it down back to that experience level, or you boil it down to a picture, it becomes a little easier to talk about. And what we want to be able to do as a partner is make sure our clients have confidence in the services or the products that they're purchasing, that they understand. How is this investment going to impact our credit union? How is this going to impact our members? And is this the right investment? It investments are, are significant. So we need to make sure that both parties understand the expectations of that investment and why they're doing that. So we take a lot of pride in the education and then probably the biggest piece uh and you know, it's one of those things that can be unappreciated, but its cybersecurity building, our infrastructure's with the tools and the processes and and the techniques so that everyone stays secure. I can tell you that there is nothing that would derail a digital transformation of an organization faster than a breach. So it's very important for us to make sure that those organizations, that everything that we do as fun as it is to talk about transformational technology equally as important that everything stays secure as we do it. >>Yeah. Well, excellent point. Certainly cybersecurity going to be a top uh topic for 2021 and beyond. Now, Michael, I'd like to move to you um what were the expected and unexpected business outcomes as a result of this partnership? >>Well, now we we we expected to have issues in the transition, which we really didn't um, I'll be honest with you, we we expected to have failures of servers. We expected stuff not to work because we were told by some of our other vendors that this will not work in a W S. Um and we were very surprised that most everything worked on AWS and it worked even better. Um some of the unexpected. So one of the main drivers of us moving to AWS was, I told you we had were limited on Rackspace I T room is when we want to implement a new service today, everything requires its own server. So everything needs an independent service, virtual server or physical server. We did not know how fast that could be done. So we would send a ticket in uh and we would say, hey, we need a new server here. The specs we're putting on this vendor, this is our time frame and we will get an email back the next morning. The servers ready to go where before? We weren't we didn't have that. That that was not an option. The main delay for new projects was to build up time and we weren't expecting that speech. No longer was that we all we expected that hey, we're not in a rush, but it'll be at least three months. And so now the team has to be ready to go as soon as you send the request in that we need this server is done uh and its speed up, speed up our time from uh, the idea our concept to going live with projects and we weren't that was something we had to get adjusted to. >>Yeah. And following up on that. What were some of the rational as well as the emotional impacts as a result of this collaboration? >>All right too. Two things and I don't know if they meet their, meet your that answer your question directly. But so one item we had in in a call, it's been several weeks back is when is the last time that anyone had to call it? Said, hey, I'm not working. My my can't access the server or I can complete dysfunction. And it's not been that way. We we've seen significantly improved up time, not only externally for our members who are logging in to do home banking or any other, any other feature, but internally for our staff we saw and I think it's just the entire transformation just made our company more resilient. What that was. I was as the metric we were seeing fewer instances of downtime. If we have downtown now, it's a power. We had an ice storm here in Mississippi, which is rare. Uh and we were down for a day. Um and if you lose internet today at any business you're down um The emotional side of I tell you, and it's been several years back on July four, we had a major major failure and our entire network was down and we this is prior to us moving to AWS and I'll just tell you I go home at night, this is the peace of mind that you can't put a dollar value on. I go home at night. And the last thing I'm worried about is my I. T. Network. I'm not worried about up time, I'm not worried about members, you know, going on facebook or any other social media and saying hey we can't we can't access your site what's going on and we don't have that anymore. And you know, I'm sure we could have had it any other way. But I leave that to the process of us moving from an in house holding everything on premise to moving to AWS, not only did it want to improve the results of those servers were able to back up to do different things, but it is to improve the overall working, working the functionality of our network. And I like I said I you can't put a dollar on this peace of mind and that is something I don't think there's any metric out there. You can measure, you can't measure that, but you know me and my team, we see it all the time. So >>Yeah, I agree, a peace of mind is certainly a priceless now Chris Let's move to you if you could outline to our audience some of the solutions that you provide, some of your other clients as well. Just give us a fuller picture of the services that you provide. Let's perhaps talk about, you know, 24/7 socks um services as well as data loss prevention or anything else that you think would be of interest to our audience? >>Yeah, for sure. So so obviously we I like to think of us like we design so we come in and we like to help you design and and figure out what your network needs to look like. That's not only your server and production network but also routing, switching. So Land Win S T Win various other networking projects equally. It's important that you can access the cloud as it is to move to the cloud, help with with productivity suite collaboration tools. Um and then finally, cyber security is a big part of that as well. So we try to come in and and look at all those things on the cybersecurity side. Very similar concept of what we do on the, on the cloud side, which is well design the tools and the infrastructure on the perimeter of the network, the configuration of any cloud environments, um such that they're secure and appropriate for your organization. Uh look at active directory or whatever organizational user management system you have to be using, implement those tools. Um and then as you mentioned, Natalie, we have a 24 x seven socks um with analysts watching that um that are all things that employees watching that board responding and reacting um using our our sin platform. And then we also have a 24 by seven uh network operations center or knocked. Um that is managing both the on site uh tools and network as well as any cloud uh networks that that they may have, keeping them up to date, doing all the routine maintenance, I will say from a cyber security perspective while it's not called the sock, the knock is just as important for cybersecurity as is the knock because we see that many cybersecurity attacks are often just taking advantage of systems that are not kept up to date. So the knock and that preventative maintenance is so important. So we do that for a lot of our clients. Some people pick and choose certain features. Some people use all of our services. >>Yeah. Terrific. Is that what you mean by security that's made to order? >>Yeah, exactly. Um you know, I think that's true of all technology. Um the biggest thing that we can do his look at the systems that you have during that design phase, we not only look at what technology should be should you be using, but also we take an assessment of your current team, What talent does your team have and where can we fill gaps if you have people that are doing security really well or you're doing preventative maintenance or some of these features? Uh Certainly you should keep that in house and we'll try to build services around those individuals that you have so that you're utilizing your talent to the best of your abilities and we're really fitting in um where you need us. >>Yeah. Terrific. Well, um you know, Michael, I'd like to shift to you now. What do you think will be the broader impact, you know, for the credit union industry? If others are not, you know, adopting the same kind of technologies um you know, to secure their cloud strategies. Mhm. >>I think whether credit unions want to or not, they're moving to the cloud. Um Most of our newest vendors are all cloud based. Um And so yes, he's either do it now or do it later. Which one do you want to be? And I do think that you're going to see more and more larger credit unions begin to move and it's scalable. It's more up time. It's easier to back up. A lot of people are hesitant. They don't want to take their information and move it out of town. They try to find a local data center are somewhere secure. And, and we looked at is what's the difference? You know, we, we we don't have latency issues with internet and fiber today. And so what is the difference of movement out of town and move to AWS by moving out of town? I still on the servers. I still leased the space. I still have to go over there. We have to have somebody there at all the time. And I'll be honest with you, I look at AWS as a trusted partner versus trying someone and then, and then it's not working locally and there's a lot of data centers you can, you can move to um I think I think it's going to come to the industry one way or the other. >>Yeah. Well, Terrific. Do you have any insight or you know, perhaps advice for another credit union who will, you know, like to take the next step? But, you know, as you mentioned, maybe a bit hesitant, >>I think doing your homework on it and looking at it as a, as a viable option is the first step. I know when I took it to my board and I talked about this um with chris and several people have so we we we talk about these things like the cloud, like it's this magical space and and our data is out there in Netherland and who knows where our data is. But when you break it down, you say, I have a East Coast data center and I have a West Coast data center. These are physical spaces where my dad is higher is held. Um I think it makes people think about a little differently. And and so when when you're if you're thinking about moving, if your if your in house today and you're thinking about how I'm gonna start outsourcing evaluate the cost, what are your ongoing cost, You know, who's gonna service you, Who's going to provide that service? And we've looked at other vendors over the years and I'll tell you, chris and his team have something unique that I found. Um I found very desirable in our situation is at our size and we're just under $300 million credit union. I don't think we have major projects that are too complicated to chris we're still, we're one of his better customers. I assume, chris me tell you something different in a minute, but we're not just a number, so I wouldn't go into a cube. You know, everybody knows each other. We're both small enough companies to where they're getting a lot bigger than we are now, but they're both small of companies where we're still, we we mean something to them, they care about moving to start versus just checking the box off. And so that's that's been our journey so far. Mhm. >>Yeah. Well, um, so, chris, uh, you know, first I want to know if Michael is one of your better customers, but uh, you know, really what I would I would really like to know is um, you know, what is your like, big sales pitch to? You know, as I mentioned to Michael, just some of those companies that are a little bit hesitant, a little bit on the edge. >>Michael is our best client of course because he's here doing this interview with us. No, um, you know, that that's something for us that are those, those human connections are, are, are so important and we do get very invested with any of the clients that we work with. But, um, in, in terms of the industry, I think Michael started to say at the beginning, which is, you're already there. We hear a lot of times from folks that they, I can't move to the cloud that the examiners or that the regulations do not allow them to be there. And that's, that's not true. Um, so what we're trying to do in partnership with KWS is educate the marketplaces as well as we can. Um, one of the biggest things that the cloud offers is this idea of flexibility and nimbleness and you know, unfortunately, I think Covid taught us that lesson, but there's, there's other lessons out there. I don't want to harp on Covid, I feel like that's all we talk about. Um, but if you look at any opportunity, whether it's a I machine learning, um, you know, Blockchain, pick the next technology, right? The reality is, none of us can really tell you where you're going to be in two years, maybe one year, three years, right? Like can you truly sit down after the past three years and tell me that you with no uncertainty, can tell me where your organization is going to be. And the reality is if you build your own data center right now, you have to make that guess Because you have to build something and designed for something and if you're making that investment, then you're doing that for the next probably 5-7 years. Whereas if you move to amazon you have the flexibility, whether that's scaling your organization up quickly, whether that's moving to the cloud, whether that's leveraging one of these technologies I just mentioned or in some cases even scaling back because things have hit a recession, we don't know what the future holds. But if you're in an environment like AWS, then you have the scalability and the flexibility to be able to move and pivot with that. And if you build your own and you happen to pick the wrong future, then then you could be in a bind and you've created your own limitations because you've decided to build for yourself. And I think that's the biggest thing is you can't build for yourself. You have to be flexible in this environment. That is that is the key. And the organizations that are flexible are the ones that are going to survive and thrive through all this uncertainty. Yeah. >>Well, really excellent point there. I totally agree with you. Wonderful to have you on our program. That was chris Saks Ceo of think stack as well as Michael Matthews, the president and Ceo at Mutual Credit Union. Thank you gentlemen for joining the show. Thanks so much. And that's all for this session of the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm your host Natalie or like thanks for >>watching. Mm.