HEBFCU partners with OGO to move infrastructure to the cloud
HAGERSTOWN, MD (November 3, 2015) — H E B Federal Credit Union (HEBFCU) of San Antonio, Texas (16,000 members and $145M in assets) recently selected Ongoing Operations to move their IT infrastructure to the cloud using a complete solution that features redundancy, very high levels of uptime and great flexibility.
With less than forty employees supported by one internal IT employee, HEBFCU is not considered a large credit union in Texas or the US. Haru Bhagat, IT Manager at HEBFCU, recalls that “we were at the end of life of many of our servers and ready for a refresh. We had also experienced some outages with some of our existing vendors and were looking for an experienced team of IT professionals to work with us every step of the way.”
With such a mission critical assignment at hand, a great deal of due diligence was called for to absolutely ensure that the right partner was chosen. HEBFCU started with a list of 10 vendors which was soon narrowed down to three finalists. After nearly a year of research, demonstrations, on-site visits and checking of references, Ongoing Operations emerged the clear victor.
Bhagat confirms that “we had a great comfort level with OGO and really liked the fact that many of their employees come from credit unions and have been with OGO for a long time.” He adds that “all of their references told us that OGO’s employees are friendly, helpful and knowledgeable.” Bhagat even took the time to visit OGO’s headquarters in Hagerstown, MD. “At the end of the day, we felt that OGO understood our needs, had a deep knowledge of the cloud, and would work hard to provide the uptime that we required,” says Bhagat.
The first order of business was to move the credit union’s all-important email platform over to OGO. Hosted Microsoft Exchange was configured and HEBFCU could then be relieved of the tedious and time consuming management of email communications. For the next phase, the credit union started moving their core production servers over to OGO – this included member statements, imaged documents, receipts, accounting folders, loan files, etc.
According to Bhagat, “we were really pleased with the design and all of our migrations have worked out smoothly.” The system is supported by multiple telecom circuits and secure VPNs (virtual private networks), and it replaced their older tape backup system with a state of the art disk-to-disk backup solution.
More recently, the credit union has added a Fedline connection for DR purposes, a connector with Digital Insight to allow members to view check images, Lync to help staff communicate internally and DR VOIP to give members and staff a back-up option to reach one another in the event of a hardware failure or power outage at HEBFCU’s headquarters. The credit union currently maintains an in-house VOIP system for everyday use and is looking to migrate that platform in late 2016 or early 2017.
Bhagat reports that their work with OGO thus far “has been a great improvement. We feel confident that our data is safe, secure and available. In fact, we successfully completed a full recovery of servers as part of our annual testing just six weeks ago.” HEBFCU’s senior management team is also pleased with the cost savings that they now enjoy. Bhagat concludes that “our relationship with OGO has saved us money and given us an improved IT infrastructure. We are pleased with the results.”
About Ongoing Operations
Ongoing Operations (OGO) is a credit union-owned technology services provider committed to delivering thought leadership, resources, and solutions that help credit union executives and IT leaders align technology with business strategy, maximize their IT investment, and improve operational performance. OGO leverages a shared platform to empower credit unions to uniquely build and manage their technology so they can focus on their core business – providing their members with value-added financial services.
OGO was founded in 2006 and is the trusted technology partner for credit unions, offering a range of managed information security, hosting, disaster recovery, and telecom solutions. Learn more at https://ongoingoperations.com/.
