Cal Housing Finance Agency Preserves Mortgage Data in the Cloud

The California Housing Finance Agency (CalHFA) was created during the sub-prime housing crisis around 2008 to help support Californians who were at risk of losing their homes. The agency has played an important role in stabilizing the state’s economy during that difficult time. CalHFA’s business requirements are similar to those of any financial lending institution with the primary difference being that the government is the lender in this case.

A number of factors contributed to the determination that migrating to the cloud was the appropriate solution for a transitioning CalHFA. Under the governor at the time, CalHFA had stopped lending to new clients and was in the mode of maintenance and reduction of the state’s related overhead responsibilities. While its role was shifting, CalHFA still needed to memorialize its confidential lending agreements and related data.

CalHFA had an on-premises platform and the lease for their datacenter was reaching completion. In addition to this, CalHFA was looking to reduce their carbon footprint and affordably and efficiently preserve their clients’ mortgage application data. Ultimately, CalHFA was reducing the size of its physical operation and staffing levels.

Project Requirements:

• Needed to design and build best practices AWS environment, including server landing zone and virtual desktop (WorkSpaces) to replace desktops
• Needed to migrate applications and data to AWS to reduce carbon footprint and replace expiring, on-premise datacenter lease
• Needed to maintain and secure access to confidential mortgage application data

CalHFA selected InterVision to design, architect and implement an efficient and effective AWS cloud architecture and strategy using our prescriptive Cloud Migration Lifecycle Assurance (CMLA) program. This followed a tightly managed project plan that included:

• Cloud services project management
• Assessment of the current IT environment and infrastructure
• New AWS architecture recommendations
• Architecture and design implementation of AWS Landing Zone and Virtual Desktop environment (WorkSpaces)
• Security evaluation, design, and recommendations
• Development, implementation and support of AWS Landing Zone
• Migration of applications into AWS Landing Zone and desktops to AWS WorkSpaces
• Assessment and configuration of storage and DR solutions
• DevOps application support
• SysOps monitoring and alerts

The Cloud Services practice also assessed and configured the cloud solution to enable data recovery and retention compliance. The goal was to ensure ongoing support for CalHFAs evolving needs. The project went to production in August 2018 and they selected our co-managed CMLA service plan.

As a result of the engagement, InterVision successfully implemented all the above bullet points and exceeded the client’s requirements. We provided them with a detailed AWS target architecture, and an efficient and executable project management schedule, which allowed CalHFA to improve visual customization / monitoring alerts using AWS SES, providing an improved solution vs. their original design doc.

AWS Services Utilized:

• WorkSpaces
• EBS
• S3
• Glacier
• Storage Gateway
• Directory Services
• WorkDocs
• SES
• VPC
• DaaS
• AWS Microsoft AD
• EC2
• EC2 dedicated hosts
• EC2 reserved instances
• AMI
• CloudTrail

Third-Party Applications or Solutions Used:

• Cloud Ranger
• Cloud Berry