USSFCU has standardized on VMware Cloud Foundation as the backbone of its private cloud, bringing compute, networking, storage, management, and security into a single, integrated platform. Key steps and outcomes: - Unified private cloud: VMware Cloud Foundation gives USSFCU a cohesive environment instead of separate, siloed systems. This helps the IT team manage infrastructure as a single platform. - Faster deployment: With VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0, the team can deploy a full environment—including workload domains, virtual networking, and security features—in under an hour once everything is connected. - Centralized operations: A new centralized console provides consolidated visibility into performance, issues, and operations. Admins no longer need to log into multiple tools to troubleshoot or monitor routine metrics. - Scalable foundation: The platform supports USSFCU’s long-term strategy to expand digital services and AI-driven offerings while maintaining control over performance and security. Overall, VMware Cloud Foundation is helping USSFCU streamline operations, respond more quickly to business needs, and maintain a consistent security and management model across its private cloud.

USSFCU has implemented VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA on top of its VMware Cloud Foundation environment to support AI use cases while keeping sensitive data within its own private cloud. How AI is being used: - Staff productivity: 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. - Member experience: The credit union is using AI to power knowledge-based chatbots that assist staff and is exploring new ways to deliver financial answers directly to members across multiple devices. - Process improvement: AI is helping USSFCU automate everyday transactions, streamline loan processing, and proactively identify member needs to support more personalized, real-time financial solutions. How data is protected: - Private environment: All AI workloads run in USSFCU’s own private cloud, avoiding the data privacy concerns that can come with public cloud AI tools. - Integrated security: VMware vDefend provides a distributed firewall, advanced threat prevention, IDS/IPS, malware prevention, and machine learning-based zero-day detection, supporting a Zero Trust approach. - Controlled data access: By keeping AI and data warehousing (via VMware Tanzu Greenplum, part of VMware Tanzu Data Intelligence) inside its security perimeter, USSFCU can reimagine services without compromising the security envelope it has invested in. This approach lets USSFCU experiment with and scale AI-driven services while maintaining tight control over member financial data and regulatory obligations.

USSFCU has layered several VMware technologies on top of VMware Cloud Foundation to improve performance, visibility, and security across its environment. Performance and scalability: - vSAN Express Storage Architecture: By moving to vSAN Express Storage Architecture with NVMe-based TLC flash devices, USSFCU simplified storage configuration and gained a significant performance boost. The team no longer needs to manage multiple storage tiers and caching strategies, and the standardized drive configuration across the fleet offers both reliability and speed, with only a minimal cost increase. - VMware Tanzu Greenplum (Tanzu Data Intelligence): As a massively parallel processing (MPP) data warehouse built on Postgres, Tanzu Greenplum lets USSFCU pull millions of rows of data in a fraction of a second. This supports faster analytics, BI, and AI/ML use cases, enabling more personalized services without disrupting existing operations. Visibility and traffic management: - VMware Avi Load Balancer: Avi provides detailed visibility into traffic flows, especially across USSFCU’s virtual desktop environment. It helps the team quickly identify sources of latency and convert those insights into actionable changes. The platform also scales natively as the environment grows and includes a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to help protect web applications and traffic from a connected Microsoft Azure environment. Security and Zero Trust: - VMware vDefend: Integrated into the hypervisor, vDefend supports USSFCU’s Zero Trust strategy with a distributed firewall, IDS/IPS, malware prevention, and machine learning-based zero-day detection. The team operates under the assumption that threats may already be present and uses vDefend to find and contain them without being overwhelmed by excessive alerts. Together, these capabilities help USSFCU run a high-performance, flexible, and secure private cloud that can adapt quickly to new digital and AI-driven services for its members.