Building a Better Experience: How Nuvision Credit Union Adopted a Flexible Cloud Network and Achieved 99.99% Network Availability

It’s easy for Enterprise architect Marvin Solis to outline Nuvision Credit Union’s business strategy:

“The first question we ask ourselves is, ‘How is this going to benefit our members?’”

Founded in 1935, Nuvision prides itself on a nearly 90-year tradition of putting members first. It originally served Douglas Aircraft workers and its values were forged in the factories and manufacturing plants that contributed to the region’s prosperity. Nuvision maintains the outlook that a better life is always possible. Whether helping members buy their first home, save for college, or plan for retirement, Nuvision has made hundreds of thousands of dreams possible.

The credit union—serving members in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Washington, and Alaska—shapes its financial products around the needs of its member-owners. The network infrastructure team does the same when considering new solutions.

“We’re heavily dedicated to automation and efficiency, always with the member in mind,” Solis explains.

Poor connections threaten the member experience

Despite their dedication to member experiences, Nuvision’s on-premise data center put the credit union’s member-first strategy at risk. Availability and application performance suffered due to power and network outages.

Solis estimates the credit union’s network availability was around 98%, which meant noticeably diminished service for members.

Nuvision’s existing network also limited the credit union’s ability to grow. It couldn’t scale easily or quickly due to the high cost of buying and maintaining hardware. “It is extremely important to be able to scale using the tools we have,” Solis says. “It took a long time to scale up our internet connections, which meant poor service to our members.”

Nuvision began considering private cloud options so they could increase bandwidth as necessary and deliver a smoother, uninterrupted experience for their members.

Comprehensive services deliver at every level

In addition to experiencing sub-optimal connectivity, they had issues accessing their infrastructure. They had two choices: upgrade their equipment or change their business model.

Nuvision initially wanted to move their data center, but after speaking with the team at Lumen, they saw the situation in a new light.

Lumen helped them weigh the benefits around the OpEx approach of upgrading against the CapEx approach of adopting a new business model. Moving to a new data center and managing their infrastructure in-house would be too expensive, so Lumen introduced the option of moving to the cloud.

Nuvision already used Microsoft Azure for some applications, although they were hesitant to migrate their entire environment to the cloud because of privacy and cost concerns. Moving their data centers off-prem to a Lumen data center gave Nuvision secured and controlled access without having to manage any of the technical aspects.

Lumen offered a one-stop shop:

• Network as a Service (NaaS) for robust backup and recovery
• Lumen^® Internet On‑Demand delivered fast, reliable connectivity
• Lumen^® Edge Private Cloud to access their infrastructure easily
• Traffic prioritization and routing through MPLS network
• Lumen Network Storage improved performance
• Using Lumen Control Center meant they could deploy new circuits quickly from a centralized location

“This was a very flexible, quick-to-deploy network solution,” Solis says. Using NaaS to add a Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) circuit was the final piece of the puzzle.

Nuvision also adopted Advanced Managed Services, which gave them the added benefit of connecting with the Lumen team for any questions or troubleshooting help. Solving their issues through a single vendor removed a considerable burden from the IT team.

Solis says the Lumen team was “extremely helpful” throughout the data center migration. They aligned with Nuvision’s belief that a better life is always possible, and these solutions give Nuvision what they need to deliver life improvements to member-owners.

“The highlight of our project has been working with the Lumen team,” Solis says. “There are a lot of very dedicated and knowledgeable people working with Lumen, and I got the sense that they were always trying to help us.”

An available, flexible network that grows with members

“The most tangible benefit has been availability,” Solis says. “By moving to the Lumen^® Edge Private Cloud and adopting the NaaS product, we have eliminated those outages and currently maintain 99.99% network availability for our members.”

The flexibility of NaaS has also allowed the credit union to grow more rapidly and efficiently.

That scalability allows Nuvision to explore new ways to improve the member experience. “If we need to increase our bandwidth because we’re deploying a new application, we’re able to do that on the fly,” Solis says.

Nuvision has seen great transformation over its decades-long history, but their commitment to strength, independence and discipline has never wavered. Their new cloud-based network supports that commitment, and they now have the flexibility and peace of mind to innovate and serve the diverse needs of members better than ever.

To learn more about Nuvision’s transformation, read the full customer success story.

Visit our customer story library to learn how organizations in virtually every industry are achieving their business objectives.

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