Digital customer service optimised with performance and security improvements from Well Architected Reviews

About Glasgow Credit Union

Glasgow Credit Union has grown substantially during the past four decades, and is today the largest most successful UK credit union. Offering loans, savings, and mortgages to people who live or work within greater Glasgow, the member-owned financial mutual maintains a strong focus on providing bespoke products and strong sense of service.

 

The Challenge

With customers spread across greater Glasgow, providing an efficient and secure self-serve experience is an integral part of Glasgow Credit Union’s business offering. The company delivers this through their GCU Public Application, a bespoke platform hosting their website and mobile applications, where customers can manage their savings and loan accounts and payments.

Responsible for large amounts of sensitive customer and financial data, the union recognises the importance of ensuring it’s AWS-based environment is as secure as possible, especially against a backdrop of ever-increasing cyber crime.

 

The Solution

Glasgow Credit Union engaged with CirrusHQ, calling upon our expertise to ensure their platform architecture was well constructed, secure, and optimised for best use and value.

A Well-Architected Review was carried out by CirrusHQ on both the GCU Public Application, and the GCU Staff Application. The latter allows staff to process customer applications made by phone or by other channels, and interact with customers to assist in securing Glasgow Credit Union services.

The review scope included recommendations on implementing DevOps practices for the deployment of the Glasgow Credit Union applications, such as a fully integrated CI/CD pipeline deployed with Infrastructure as Code to speed up application deployment time. Integrating Runbooks and Playbooks for operational staff was also included, with additional testing added to the deployment process. A review of people and machine access enabled us to determine new restriction levels and authorise only those requiring access for operation. The applications are now able to be deployed in a more agile manner, with monitoring and security that has been significantly transformed and future-proofed.

 

The Benefits

    1. Performance & security optimisation across the AWS environment
      Enhanced reporting, auditability, traceability, and logging capabilities
    2. Better understanding of how to fully harness the AWS toolset
      AWS knowledge share to support ongoing architecture maintenance
    3. Ability to drive maximum value from existing technology investment
      Cost-neutral improvements recommended by CirrusHQ AWS expertise

“CirrusHQ are a highly responsive, knowledgeable team. In addition to that they are genuinely a great team to work with, friendly and supportive and they are happy to go above and beyond to assist.”

Paul Mcfarlane
Chief Technology Officer
Glasgow Credit Union

 

About APN Partner CirrusHQ and Amazon Web Services

Glasgow Credit Union were introduced to CirrusHQ by AWS as an Advanced Consulting Partner with the correct certifications and accreditations to assist them via the Well-Architected Framework. This framework was used to deliver an evaluation of their architecture’s key concepts and design principles and to implement architectural best practices for running workloads in the AWS Cloud.

A Review is designed to help organisations find opportunities for significant cost savings, improved application performance and reduced security risks.

 

Next Steps
To learn more about how AWS and APN Partner CirrusHQ can help your organisation, get in touch.