 Hello, and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. And I'm delighted to introduce our next guests. They are Chris Sacks, CEO of ThinkStack and Michael Matthews, president CEO at Mutual Credit Union. I'm your host for theCUBE, Natalie Erlich, of course, and we're going to highlight the most impactful nonprofit partner award. Thank you gentlemen for joining the program. Thank you Natalie. Thanks for having us. Terrific. Well, delighted for you to be here. And Michael, I'd love to start with you. How did you figure out that cloud technology was critical to the future of Mutual Credit Union? It's kind of about chance Natalie, we're sitting down and we're looking at racks of equipment in our IT room and trying to keep everything up to date, software updated, become a full-time job and all of my staff had sat around and they would come to a point to where we were spending more time keeping upgrades, keeping servers upgraded. And we asked, we reached out to ThinkStack, they were our network provider at the time and we said, hey, what are our options? And they came back with several options and one of them was AWS and we explored it and we've not looked back. Terrific. Well, can you explain in further detail how you identified some of the gaps and what stood out to you about ThinkStack, how this collaboration happened specifically? Well, some of the major gaps that you had is, we're in Vicksburg, Mississippi. And I would say it's probably not the IT mecca of the United States. And staffing was a huge requirement for us. If you're gonna make a move such as this, you've gotta have the staffing. And then along with the staffing is okay, if we go out and we hire all these individuals to help with this journey, are they gonna become board? And if we personally, I think if I ask ThinkStack, they would say, oh yes, don't do that hire us. But that's their job, they're our partner vendor. And so we went out and we asked other vendors that we used and said, what are the chances of us doing this? And it was slim to none. And this type of technology, you want somebody who you can call and all honesty, I wanna be able to call Chris and say, Chris, I'm having a problem versus one of my team call me and say, we're having a problem. I'd rather call and I love the vendor relationship. It has worked out well. Our major gap in staffing there Natalie. What about staffing? That was our major gap. Oh, got it, got it. Well, Chris, let's move on to you now. I'd love it if you could explain in some detail for our audience about the methodology of your company and also how you help your clients visualize their transformation processes. Yeah, for sure, thanks Natalie. So we work with credit unions around the country and many of them are facing similar challenges to Michael at Mutual. And in addition to staffing, they're often challenged with just the uncertain future of technology and that can include things like hurricanes, wildfires, various different disasters, pandemics and having to work remotely. But it also includes all of the opportunities that exist in transformative technologies for credit union they need to keep pace with organizations like Robinhood and Stash and some of these other organizations that are providing cutting edge mobile apps and technology to their customers. And so how do you, as an organization, generally that's a small nonprofit organization, how do you build a technology that will allow you to have a foundation to respond and react to whatever the world happens to throw at you be that an opportunity to take advantage of for growth or some kind of risk from a cyber attack to a natural disaster. So what we try to do with our clients is take a very human centered approach first. And the idea behind that is to not walk in the door and talk about all the wonderful benefits of AWS or any other particular technology, but rather look at what do you expect? So if you take Michael, for example, sitting down with him and trying to look out 10 years, what do you expect the industry to look like? What do you expect your organization to look like and what goals do you have as a credit union to take advantage of those opportunities and to mitigate those risks? Once you identify those business needs, we can start looking at the humans that are involved in that experience. And so that would obviously be the employees and the partners and vendors that support and make up the team at the credit union. And then obviously it's their current members and then any other members that they want to attract. And so you have to look at both sides of this. How do you work securely, efficiently as an employee on the flip side, how do you serve your members as well as you can serve them with cutting edge technology with technology that's always up and available and then obviously with utmost security? So as we identify and build that picture, we generally do that with stick figures, Natalie. So we try to go in and take different personas and we use journey mapping and we use strategic foresight and various other exercise that help us literally paint a picture and then from there we kind of back into that and say, okay, in order for you to accomplish these things and to have the organization that you want to have for the next 10 years, what is your technology foundation and footprint need to look like to support that? And that's where we start to then back into that design, which typically would include some type of public cloud service like AWS, among other technologies from a cybersecurity perspective to build out that foundation and then allow them to respond and react to whatever the world throws at them over the next 10 years. Terrific. Well, Michael would love to get your insight. How did you experience that human centered design focus that ThinkStack is known for? I think that's what says ThinkStack a part. There's numerous vendors, you can go direct. There's plenty of software, there's plenty of technology out there you can buy. And as a credit union, we can go out, we can just about get anything we wanted. But when we have a problem that we're trying to solve it's not about that. It's about sitting down with Chris, his team and saying, Chris, this is a problem. We recently had one in password management, but this is a problem we're having. How do we solve this problem? And so the focus is not about trying to sell you another software, the focus is about solving the problem and having your staff and your team work more efficiently and effectively at their task. At the end of the day, we're not IT people. We're in the financial service business. We rely on the solutions that we have to help us do our jobs better and serve our members more effectively. Yeah, well, Chris, from your perspective, obviously human centered designed a really big component of your business, but what other key features sets your business apart from the competitive landscape? So I think that the human centered design bleeds into another area that we really pride ourselves on, which is education and what I will call plain talk. So again, as Michael said, these organizations are financial services. They're not technology experts. So you need to be able to communicate to those teams, those boards of directors, executive teams in a way that they can understand. And it can be somewhat difficult to talk about complex technical problems. But when you boil it down back to that experience level or you boil it down to a picture, it becomes a little easier to talk about. And what we want to be able to do as a partner is make sure our clients have confidence in the services or the products that they're purchasing that they understand, how is this investment going to impact our credit union? How is this going to impact our members? And is this the right investment? IT investments are significant. So we need to make sure that both parties understand the expectations of that investment and why they're doing that. So we take a lot of pride in the education and then probably the biggest piece and it's one of those things that can be unappreciated but is cybersecurity, building our infrastructures with the tools and the processes and the techniques so that everyone stays secure. I can tell you that there's nothing that would derail a digital transformation of an organization faster than a breach. So it's very important for us to make sure that those organizations, that everything that we do as fun as it is to talk about transformational technology equally as important that everything stays secure as we do it. Yeah, well, excellent point. Certainly cybersecurity going to be a top topic for 2021 and beyond. Now, Michael, I'd like to move to you. What were the expected and unexpected business outcomes as a result of this partnership? Well, Natalie, we expected to have issues in the transition which we really didn't. I'll be honest with you. We expected to have failures of servers. We expected stuff not to work because we were told by some of our other vendors that others will not work in AWS. And we were very surprised that most everything worked in AWS and it worked even better. Some of the unexpected. So one of the main drivers of us moving to AWS was, I told you, we're limited on rack space, IT room, is when we want to implement a new service today, everything requires its own server. So everything needs an independent server, be that virtual server or physical server. We did not know how fast that could be done. So we would send a ticket in and we would say, hey, we need a new server here, the specs. We're putting on this vendor. This is our time frame. And we would get an email back the next morning and the server's ready to go. Where before, we didn't have that. That was not an option. The main delay for new projects was IT buildup time. And we weren't expecting that the speed so no longer was it. We expected that, hey, we're not in a rush but it'll be at least three months. And so now the team has to be ready to go. So as you send the request in and we need the server, it's done. And it's speed up, it's spent up our time from the idea concept, our concept to going live with projects. And that was something we had to get adjusted to. Yeah. And following up on that, what were some of the rational as well as the emotional impacts as a result of this collaboration? All right, two things. And I don't know if they answered your question directly but so one item we had in a call, it's been several weeks back. When was the last time that anyone had a call that said, hey, I'm not working, I can't access the server or I can't complete this function. And it's not been that way. We've seen significantly improved uptime not only externally for our members who were logging in to do home banking or any other feature, but internally for our staff. We saw, I think it was just the entire transformation just made our company more resilient. That was, that's the metric. We are seeing fewer instances of downtime. If we have downtown now as a power, we had an ice storm here in Mississippi, which is rare, and we were down for a day. But if you lose internet today in any business, you're down. The emotional side of, I'll tell you, and it's been several years back on July 4th, we had a major failure and our entire network was down. And we, this has prior to us moving AWS. And I'll just tell you, I go home at night, this is the peace of mind that you can't put a dollar value on. I go home at night and the last thing I'm worried about is my IT network. I'm not worried about uptime. I'm not worried about members going on Facebook or any other social media and saying, hey, we can't access your site, what's going on? And we don't have that anymore. And I'm sure we could have had that any other way, but I lead that to the process of us moving from an in-house, holding everything on-premise to moving to AWS. Not only did it want to improve the results of the other servers or we're able to back up to do different things, but it's to improve the overall working, working the functionality of our network. And I, like I said, you can't put a dollar on that. It's peace of mind. And that is something I don't think there's any metric out there you can measure, you can't measure that. But it will be in my team. We see it all the time now. So. Yeah, I agree. A peace of mind is certainly priceless. Now, Chris, let's move to you. If you could outline to our audience some of the solutions that you provide some of your other clients as well, just to give us a fuller picture of the services that you provide. Let's perhaps talk about 24 seven SOC services as well as data loss prevention or anything else that you think would be of interest to our audience. Yeah, for sure. So obviously we, I like to think of us like we design. So we come in and we like to help you design and figure out what your network needs to look like. That's not only your server and production network, but also routing, switching. So LAN, WAN, SD, WAN, various other networking projects equally as important that you can access the cloud as it is to move to the cloud. Help with productivity suite, collaboration tools. And then finally cybersecurity is a big part of that as well. So we try to come in and look at all those things on the cybersecurity side, very similar concept to what we do on the cloud side, which is we'll design the tools and the infrastructure and the perimeter of the network, the configuration of any cloud environments such that they're secure and appropriate for your organization. Look at Active Directory or whatever organizational user management system you have to be using, implement those tools. And then as you mentioned, Natalie, we have a 24 by seven SOC with analysts watching that, that are all things that employees watching that board, responding and reacting using our SIM platform. And then we also have a 24 by seven network operation center or NOC that is managing both the onsite tools and network as well as any cloud networks that they may have keeping them up to date doing all the routine maintenance. I will say from a cybersecurity perspective, while it's not called the SOC, the NOC is just as important for cybersecurity as is the NOC because we see that many cybersecurity attacks are often just taking advantage of systems that are not kept up to date. So the NOC and that preventative maintenance is so important. So we do that for a lot of our clients. Some people pick and choose certain features. Some people use all of our services. Yeah, terrific. Is that what you mean by security that's made to order? Yeah, exactly. I think that's true of all technology. The biggest thing that we can do is look at the systems that you have. During that design phase, we not only look at what technology should you be using, but also we take an assessment of your current team. What talent does your team have and where can we fill gaps? If you have people that are doing security really well or you're doing preventative maintenance or some of these features, certainly you should keep that in-house and we'll try to build services around those individuals that you have so that you're utilizing your talent to the best of your abilities and we're really fitting in where you need us. Yeah, terrific. Well, Michael, I'd like to shift to you now. What do you think will be the broader impact for the credit union industry if others are not adopting the same kind of technologies to secure their cloud strategies? I think whether credit unions want to or not, they're moving to the cloud. Most of our newest vendors are all cloud-based and so it's easy to do it now or do it later. Which one do you want to be? And I do think that you're going to see more and more larger credit unions begin to move and it's scalable, it's more uptime, it's easier to back up. And a lot of people are hesitant. They don't want to take their information and move it out of town. They don't try to find a local data center or somewhere secure. And we looked at it as what's the difference? We don't have latency issues with internet and fiber today and so what is the difference of moving it out of town and moving it AWS? By moving it out of town, I still own the servers. I still lease the space. I still have to go over there. I have to have somebody there at all time and I'll be honest with you. I look at AWS as a trusted partner versus trying someone and then not working locally. And there's a lot of data centers you can move to. I think it's going to come to the industry one way or the other. Yeah, well, terrific. Do you have any insight or perhaps advice for another credit union who will like to take the next step? But as you mentioned, maybe a bit hesitant. I think doing your homework on it and looking at it as a viable option is the first step. I know when I took it to my board and I talked about this with Chris and several of people. So we talk about these things like the cloud, like it's this magical space and our data is out there in Netherland. And who knows where our data is. But when you break it down, you say, hey, I have a East Coast data center and I have a West Coast data center. These are physical spaces where my data is higher, is held. I think it makes people think about a little differently. And so when you're, if you're thinking about moving, if you're in-house today and you're thinking about, hey, I'm gonna start outsourcing, evaluate the cost. What are your ongoing costs? Who is gonna service you? Who's gonna provide that service? And we've looked at other vendors over the years and I'll tell you, Chris and his team have something unique that I found very desirable in our situation is at our size and we're just under $300 million credit union. I don't think we have major projects that are too complicated. To Chris, we're one of his better customers. I assume Chris may tell you something differently in a minute, but we're not just a number. So I wouldn't go into a queue. Everybody knows each other. We're both small enough companies to where, they'll get there a lot bigger than we are now. But they're both small enough companies to where we're still, we mean something to them. They care about moving to Florida versus just checking the box off. And so that's been our journey so far. Yeah, well, so Chris, first I wanna know if Michael is one of your better customers, but really what I would really like to know is, what is your like big sales pitch to, as I mentioned to Michael, just some of those companies that are a little bit hesitant, a little bit on the edge? Michael is our best client, of course, because he's here doing this interview with us. No, that's something for us that those human connections are so important and we do get very invested with any of the clients that we work with. But in terms of the industry, I think Michael started to say it at the beginning, which is you're already there. We hear a lot of times from folks that they can't move to the cloud, that the examiners or that the regulations do not allow them to be there. And that's not true. So what we're trying to do in partnership with AWS is educate the marketplaces as well as we can. One of the biggest things that the cloud offers is this idea of flexibility and nimbleness. And unfortunately, I think COVID taught us that lesson, but there's other lessons out there. I don't want to harp on COVID. I feel like that's all we talk about nowadays. But if you look at any opportunity, whether it's AI, machine learning, blockchain, pick the next technology, right? The reality is none of us can really tell you where you're going to be in two years, maybe one year, three years, right? Like can you truly sit down after the past three years and tell me that you with no uncertainty can tell me where your organization's gonna be. And the reality is if you build your own data center right now, you have to make that guess because you have to build something and design for something. And if you're making that investment then you're doing that for the next probably five to seven years. Whereas if you move to Amazon, you have the flexibility, whether that's scaling your organization up quickly, whether that's moving to the cloud, whether that's leveraging one of these technologies I just mentioned, or in some cases even scaling back because things have had a recession. We don't know what the future holds, but if you're in an environment like AWS then you have the scalability and the flexibility to be able to move and pivot with that. And if you build your own and you happen to pick the wrong future, then you could be in a bind and you've created your own limitations because you've decided to build for yourself. And I think that's the biggest thing is you can't build for yourself. You have to be flexible in this environment. That is the key. And the organizations that are flexible are the ones that are gonna survive and thrive through all this uncertainty. Well, really excellent point there. I totally agree with you. Wonderful to have you on our program. That was Chris Sacks, CEO of ThinkStack, as well as Michael Matthews, the president and CEO at Mutual Credit Union. Thank you gentlemen for joining the show. Thanks, Annalya. And that's all for this session of the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich. Thanks for watching.