USSFCU has spent the past decade reshaping its IT environment around a secure private cloud built on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). The goal was to gain scalability, security, and operational efficiency to keep pace with growing member expectations.

With VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0, USSFCU now manages compute, networking, storage, management, and security from a single, centralized console. Instead of jumping between multiple tools, administrators get consolidated visibility into performance, issues, and infrastructure health in one place.

Deployment speed has also improved significantly. According to USSFCU’s CIO/CTO, once everything is connected, the team can deploy an entire VCF 9.0 environment in less than an hour, including workload domains, virtual networking, and security features. Operations and observability are integrated from day one, which reduces setup complexity and accelerates time to value.

For members, this modern private cloud foundation supports a more reliable and secure online banking platform and mobile app, enabling consistent access to accounts, payments, and other services with strong performance and protection of sensitive financial data.

USSFCU has implemented VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA on top of its VMware Cloud Foundation environment to bring AI closer to its data while maintaining strict security controls.

The credit union chose a private AI approach to avoid the privacy concerns that can come with public cloud AI tools. Sensitive financial and member data stays within USSFCU’s own secure private cloud, under its existing security and compliance framework.

AI is already widely adopted internally: more than half of USSFCU’s employees use the AI solution regularly, with up to 30 employees using it daily to assist with their work. Use cases include:

• Powering knowledge-based chatbots that support staff
• Exploring AI-driven tools to deliver personalized, real-time financial answers to members across devices
• Automating everyday transactions and streamlining loan processing
• Proactively identifying member needs to make services more intuitive and secure

Security is reinforced by VMware’s integrated capabilities, including VMware vDefend for distributed firewalling, advanced threat prevention, IDS/IPS, malware prevention, and machine learning-based zero-day detection. USSFCU follows a Zero Trust mindset—assuming threats may already be present and using vDefend to close gaps without overwhelming the team with noise.

This combination of private AI and integrated security allows USSFCU to reimagine member experiences with AI while keeping financial data protected inside its own environment.

To support its expanding digital services, USSFCU has upgraded several key components of its VMware-based environment for performance, data agility, and security.

1. High-performance storage with vSAN Express Storage Architecture
USSFCU moved to VMware vSAN Express Storage Architecture, optimized for NVMe-based TLC flash. This shift:

• Eliminated manual work around storage tiering and caching
• Standardized drive configurations across the fleet
• Delivered a significant performance boost with only a minimal cost increase

The CIO/CTO describes vSAN Express Storage Architecture as “really fast” and notes that the trade-off of slightly higher cost for standardized, high-performance drives was an easy decision.

2. Smarter traffic management with VMware Avi Load Balancer
USSFCU uses VMware Avi Load Balancer to manage network traffic and load balancing, especially across its virtual desktop environment. Benefits include:

• Clear visibility into traffic flows and patterns
• Faster identification of latency sources and other performance issues
• Built-in Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect web applications, including traffic from Microsoft Azure
• Native scalability as the environment grows

3. Unified data and analytics with VMware Tanzu Data Intelligence
USSFCU uses VMware Tanzu Greenplum (part of VMware Tanzu Data Intelligence) as a centralized data warehouse to unify disparate internal data sources. As a massively parallel processing system built on Postgres, it allows the team to:

• Integrate business intelligence and AI/ML capabilities
• Support new business initiatives without building custom connectors for each request
• Query at scale—pulling millions of rows of data in a fraction of a second
• Run the platform in their own private environment without weakening their security posture

Together, these technologies give USSFCU the performance, data access, and protection it needs to continue improving online loan applications, membership onboarding, and future AI-driven services such as 24x7 AI avatars for member support.