Platform

AWS

VITAL Card (VITAL), an innovative fintech that offers a World Elite Mastercard® consumer credit card, provides digital-first capabilities to cardholders through its VITAL Card mobile application. VITAL aims to empower its members and future users with income and credit-building opportunities, creating community among cardholders and incentivizing responsible spending. 

For digital natives who want a credit card that understands them, VITAL doesn’t just grant spending power, like other credit cards. VITAL Card and VITAL Card App also offer community members credit health insights, a gamified approach to credit-building, and monetary rewards for sharing and spending responsibly. 

VITAL has partnered with Connectria for the past two years, starting with onboarding its Microsoft Azure initial deployment and later leveraging Connectria support to migrate into AWS with Connectria-managed services. VITAL’s ultimate goal was to retire its Azure footprint with as minimal disruption as possible. 

The Challenge 

VITAL engaged Connectria to migrate and manage an environment in Azure. To support its long-term strategy, VITAL expanded the scope of its engagement with Connectria to include migrating that environment to AWS. The migration effort was handled in segments, starting with the components that support its mobile application. Over time, all assets in Azure were migrated to AWS, achieving the goal of retiring VITAL’s Azure footprint with minimal disruption. 

“We were looking for a partner that was focused on security as one of its main tenants, and a partner that could support SOC– and PCI-compliant infrastructure. We knew Connectria had built a solid reputation supporting banks and other fintech organizations. Connectria’s US-based 24x7x365 monitoring was exactly what we were looking for,” said Edward Cody, VITAL COO.

“Specifically,” he said, “our big drive as a start-up was that Connectria provides many utilities and technology resources , such as monitoring, scanning, logging, backups, and others that would be a burden for us to install, configure, and maintain in a cost-effective manner. In finding Connectria, we found a trusted advisor, capability provider, and managed services partner across multiple functions.” 

The Solution 

Connectria started with the management of VITAL’s Azure environment and then migrated that environment to AWS. As part of the migration, Connectria transitioned VITAL’s AWS account under Connectria’s managed services. This included onboarding VITAL’s entire AWS organization into managed support with Connectria’s security, monitoring, patching, and backup services along with the continued support of the 24×7 Operations Center. Connectria’s AWS and Managed Services team reviewed and updated run books and escalation procedures to ensure VITAL’s AWS environment would receive top-tier support across all accounts.

“It’s nice to have a managed support partner, especially when it comes to alerts in real-time. I feel we’ve always had the support [from Connectria] available when needed. The access to communication helps us identify errors as they happen, address them immediately, and come to solutions relatively easily,” said Nour Kodeih, Head of Engineering at VITAL.

“While we considered other potential partners, none of those other candidates had the same technical capabilities nor a comparable compliance and security program to what we found in Connectria. Connectria’s managed services capability and offering for the price was unmatched in our research,” said Edward Cody. 

The Results

Ultimately, Connectria delivered bottom line–based benefits for VITAL. The VITAL team is able to spend much more time and resources on its product and overseeing its security and compliance program instead of having to build it all on its own. VITAL’s internal teams and resources are focused primarily on providing customer solutions, while Connectria brings experts to handle the AWS managed services, advisory services, and security capability.

“Working with Connectria has let us advance our product without having to expend resources that aren’t core to supporting our customers. The key benefits of our relationship with Connectria are definitely assurance and communication with strong attention to detail,” said Nour Kodeih.

“For any other fintech organizations in search of public cloud or security and compliance support, I cannot recommend Connectria enough. Why go it alone, when you can work with a vendor that can support you? Instead of figuring out how you’re going to stand up different tools and techniques, you can instead get the coverage you need, paired with the added benefit of support and expertise. Initial start-up costs alone make it almost prohibitive not to work with a partner like Connectria,” said Edward Cody.