ANAHEIM, Calif.–Credit unions cannot be Swiss Army Knives and be everything to everyone, according to one person, who also pointed out that many of the tools in the knives aren’t particularly good, anyway.
In remarks themed “Using the Cloud to be Different and Better,” Robbie Wright of Ongoing Operations told the NACUSO annual meeting here that too often credit unions “try to be everything to everybody, but we don’t do the best job for everyone. Don’t be everything to everyone. That goes for your credit union and your cloud tools. The cloud allows you to offer better differentiated products to your members. As a credit union, and people laugh when I say this, you need to be a lubricant, you need to make it easier for your members. Everybody started off offering loans to people who might not be able to get them elsewhere. I want credit unions to find that issue they can fix and make it go more smoothly.”
Wright urged credit unions to find areas where the cloud can bring value, and walked his audience through specific examples, including email security and speed of website loading (ideally in the two to three second range).
He pointed to Amazon.com as a good example of a company that recognizes the value of load speed. Amazon pushes a page to consumers often in less than two seconds, even as the back end of its site may take up to 40 seconds to fully load.
“This is where credit unions should be spending a little bit of their time and it’s not rocket science,” said Wright.
But where does a credit union start in all that without spending a ton of time and money? He recommended Cloudfront as one solution that costs between $10 to $30 a month and helps improve load time. Another solution is Microsoft’s Azure Express Route.
“A lot of things with the cloud aren’t about throwing money at it,” he said. “It’s about spending time and focusing on what it is you want to accomplish and then finding the right tools to do the job.”
Another “hot thing” Wright said he and Ongoing Operations have been seeing is attention being paid to “encryption at rest,” the term for protecting data that isn’t moving through networks. He noted several credit unions with whom he has spoken have already been told by NCUA that it will become part of the focus during exams.
But encryption at rest is another issue where a lot of money doesn’t always have to be spent. He related how one credit union client of Ongoing Operations had been told by one company it would have to spend $300,000 on encryption at rest, yet the credit union was able to use Amazon Web Services to encrypt the data at almost no cost.
“What the cloud is successfully doing here is lowering the barriers to entry and making encryption way easier,” Wright said. “Amazon Web Services is not a good fit for most credit unions right now. But this is coming and the cloud is one of those tools to do it just a little bit more efficiently.”