Customer

Land of Lincoln Credit Union is headquartered in the Midwest. They’ve been an NWN customer for about four years, using our professional services and Managed SIEM prior to this story.

The Vision and Challenge

Given evolving business demands and the innovating IT landscape, their strategy was to move more workloads into the cloud for increased flexibility, cost savings and scalability.

The Land of Lincoln Credit Union sought to double in size over the next five years but needed to design a verifiable IT disaster recovery (DR) plan to protect their crucial assets during this growth. To achieve the growth they desired, their DR strategy needed to take first priority. However, the recently-appointed CIO also didn’t want his small IT team focused on managing DR, so he was searching for a managed DR solution that would meet their reliability needs, as well as recovery time objective (RTO) requirements of 2-3 hours and recovery point objective (RPO) of minutes.

The Outcome

NWN organized a three-hour strategy session to review the credit union’s goals and business requirements. Following the session, we mapped out their priorities, their highest being DR. After a discussion with their team, they decided to move forward with DRaaS to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

We provided diversity between our DRaaS offerings, sharing options from an MWM-hosted environment to our DRaaS targeted at AWS. Their major concerns were around maintaining compliance and ensuring security of the AWS landing zone, data privacy, and whether another financial institution was leveraging AWS today. We put together all the information necessary to provide them the confidence they needed in these areas. Our ability to address their concerns at depth showed just how great the AWS-targeted solution could be and their team was impressed with our verified status as an APN Premier Consulting Partner to assist them.

NWN’s team worked alongside the IT team to design and execute the DRaaS solution, then tested it for verification. The DRaaS solution has resulted in the following:

• Provided confidence in recovery that they could demonstrate to their president and board
• Allowed their small IT team to focus on other priorities
• Provided the ability to scale as the company grows

The Land of Lincoln team was impressed with the DRaaS to AWS solution. Discussions have continued for managed services, cloud and professional services.