How VITAL Card Leveraged AWS for Its Long-Term Cloud Strategy

Platform

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

The Challenge 

VITAL engaged Lightedge to migrate and manage an environment in Azure. To support its long-term strategy, VITAL expanded the scope of its engagement with Lightedge 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 Lightedge had built a solid reputation supporting banks and other fintech organizations. Lightedge’s US-based 24x7x365 monitoring was exactly what we were looking for. Specifically, our big drive as a start-up was that Lightedge 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 Lightedge, we found a trusted advisor, capability provider, and managed services partner across multiple functions.”
— Edward Cody, Chief Operating Officer at VITAL.

 

The Solution 

Connectria started with the management of VITAL’s Azure environment and then migrated that environment to AWS. As part of the migration, Lightedge transitioned VITAL’s AWS account under Lightedge’s managed services. This included onboarding VITAL’s entire AWS organization into managed support with Lightedge’s security, monitoring, patching, and backup services along with the continued support of the 24×7 Operations Center. Lightedge’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 Lightedge] available when needed. The access to communication helps us identify errors as they happen, address them immediately, and come to solutions relatively easily,”
— 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 Lightedge. Lightedge’s managed services capability and offering for the price was unmatched in our research.”
— Edward Cody, Chief Operating Officer at VITAL.

The Results

Ultimately, Lightedge 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 Lightedge brings experts to handle the AWS managed services, advisory services, and security capability.