With COVID putting a greater emphasis on business continuity and security than ever before, Volante believes the answer to all of the uncertainty lies in cloud technology. “The painful lesson that COVID-19 has taught the industry is that we cannot always anticipate what the future holds,” says Vijay Oddiraju, co-founder and CEO of Volante. “All we can do is arm ourselves with the most advanced technology available to foster resiliency, security and adaptability, no matter the circumstance.”
The following is an excerpt from What Did You Change?, contributed by Vijay Oddiraju, co-founder and CEO of Volante.
From a business perspective, it’s difficult to identify just one significant change we made in our response to COVID-19. It highlighted the need to guarantee business continuity for both ourselves and our customers, while maintaining the already high level of security we had put into place as a provider of mission-critical cloud payment processing solutions and services.
Neither of these concepts is new — it’s more accurate to say that the pandemic accelerated the roadmap for initiatives we already had in place to mitigate as much risk as possible for our customers and employees.
As background, at Volante we’re leaders in accelerating payments innovation and modernization, ensuring that banks and financial institutions can build, maintain and grow their market leadership by better serving their customers, today and into the future.
We recognize that the financial services community depends on our solutions and services for mission-critical operations, and that these operations absolutely had to continue without disruption. So that our customers were able to receive a seamless, uninterrupted experience, we ensured that all of our support staff had high-speed internet, PPE and telecommunications equipment to collaborate effectively, regardless of their time zone or work location.
Strategically, our position is and always has been to evangelize the powerful, modernizing effects of the cloud. Keeping all applications and data on the cloud is undeniably the single most important technological solution for business continuity, resiliency and improved productivity, while reducing cost and complexity.
Accordingly, we accelerated our adoption of cloud-based HR, IT, CRM and marketing automation platforms for our company, and have been actively working with customers to help them migrate their legacy payments processing applications to our modern cloud-native service.
It’s no surprise that we prioritized security more than ever during this time. When the company was faced with having to set up and deploy a full remote workforce, we looked very carefully at how we could guarantee a transition in a way that didn’t compromise security. We added dual authentication to connections that were already protected by a VPN, and we purchased additional hardware and licenses to cover every possible scenario. In short, we took extra precautions to ensure that our existing security standards were followed, and that all devices and processes were doubly secured.
The painful lesson that COVID-19 has taught the industry is that we cannot always anticipate what the future holds. All we can do is arm ourselves with the most advanced technology available to foster resiliency, security and adaptability, no matter the circumstance. At Volante, we know that the answer to all of this uncertainty lies in the cloud.