Cloud Confidence: How Novuna gains speed, resilience and focus with Alfa Cloud
Summary
Cloud resilience has become a defining challenge for financial services. As outages make headlines and regulators tighten expectations, many lenders are rethinking how to secure core platforms while accelerating innovation.
In the recent Finance Connect webcast, ‘Cloud Confidence: How Novuna gains speed, resilience and focus with Alfa Cloud’, Matthew Colville-Foley, Head of Change Delivery at Novuna Business Finance and Alex Barnes, Director of Cloud Hosting at Alfa, explore Novuna’s transition to Alfa Cloud and the value it has delivered.
Escaping the constraints of legacy technology
Novuna’s journey began with an increasingly fragile technology stack. Its instance of Alfa Systems ran on niche hardware and an outdated operating system, requiring heavy annual cycles of patching and upgrades. Months each year were spent maintaining stability rather than delivering improvements.
The team faced a growing risk around skills: the legacy environment depended on specialist knowledge that was becoming scarce. Even if Novuna migrated the platform into its own cloud environment, the organisation would still need to recruit and train people with entirely new cloud competencies.
At the same time, a broader strategic shift was underway. The organisation had already accepted that its future did not lie in running a data centre. This view was reinforced during Covid, when its core data centre provider came close to failure, bringing resilience into sharp focus and accelerating the move toward a fully cloud-based model.
Against this backdrop, Alfa Cloud emerged as the logical choice. Rather than building and maintaining cloud expertise internally, Novuna chose a model in which its software provider hosts, manages and supports the platform. The benefits were immediate: reduced complexity, fewer unknown dependencies and a partner invested in operating the platform at scale.
The Alfa Cloud model: Consistency, speed and continuous improvement
For Alfa, the shift to cloud has transformed both operations and customer value. Public cloud platforms enable us to scale infrastructure easily and quickly, tap into rapidly advancing database and integration technologies and push new capabilities, including AI-driven features.
A defining feature of Alfa Cloud is its single-tenant yet highly standardised architecture. Each customer operates in an isolated environment, but all share a consistent underlying blueprint, covering databases, services, versions and security layers. This significantly improves support responsiveness: when issues arise, our teams already understand the architecture and can act quickly.
Migration approaches vary depending on the customer. Some organisations opt for a lift-and-shift of their existing Alfa version, while others like Novuna combine migration with a major upgrade. For new customers, Alfa provides pre-configured templates and standards-based integrations to accelerate time to value.
Resilience for a new regulatory era
Operational resilience was a central theme of the discussion. When asked whether Novuna feels more resilient on Alfa Cloud, Matthew’s response was immediate: “One hundred percent.”
The shift from a single data centre with periodic disaster recovery tests to a cloud environment with multi-region redundancy, active-active failover and continuous monitoring represents a profound change. Novuna is no longer reliant on physically relocating staff or hoping that a backup data centre remains available. It can now switch workloads dynamically, support staff working from anywhere and build redundancy even into third-party services such as AML or ID checking, which can be swapped out automatically if one provider suffers a failure.
"Moving to Alfa Cloud has cut our BAU IT costs, retired legacy systems, made data instantly accessible, and enabled us to provide better services and deliver more value to our customers."
Alfa is extending this capability further through our Data Guardian framework. The goal is not merely to withstand outages, but to recover from them with speed and predictably. Using infrastructure-as-code, Alfa can automatically rebuild entire environments, drawing on replicated data across regions and even across cloud providers. This means recovery is no longer dependent on scenario planning or manual intervention; the tools used every day to maintain the platform are the same tools used to restore it in an emergency.
With regulators increasingly focused on recovery capabilities, not just prevention, Alfa provides detailed testing evidence to support customers in meeting FCA and DORA requirements.
“Our use of cloud features underpins everything we do from a resilience standpoint. We combine these capabilities with deep expertise in how the Alfa platform operates to engineer robust resilience features, both embedded within the platform and delivered as value-added services to our customers. The launch of Data Guardian reflects this approach, setting a benchmark for best practice in resilient data storage and replication, and ensuring we can safely restore and protect our customers’ businesses.”
Trust, transparency and the reality of third-party risk
Moving to cloud shifts the risk profile. Instead of managing one’s own data centre, organisations must manage a broader supply chain involving cloud providers, SaaS vendors and their subcontractors. Matthew explains that Novuna takes a multi-layered approach, assessing not only Alfa but also its underlying suppliers.
However, resilience is not purely technical – culture is just as important. A resilient partnership depends on transparency, clear communication and a shared commitment to continuous improvement. If a customer and supplier reach the point where they are citing contract clauses at each other, something fundamental has broken down. Long-term success requires openness about plans, challenges and expected outcomes from both sides.
Refocusing talent and unlocking business value
A key outcome of Novuna’s cloud journey has been the transformation of its operating model. Rather than reducing headcount, the shift has enabled a move toward platform and product-oriented teams.
Employees previously focused on maintaining legacy infrastructure are transitioning into modern roles such as platform engineering, cloud architecture, data engineering and automation, supported by structured career pathways and investment in skills development.
The benefits are already evident. Novuna has reduced BAU IT costs, retired legacy-dependent services and unlocked access to historical data through cloud-based dashboards and analytics. This increased agility allows faster responses to both customer expectations and regulatory demands.
Cost control in the cloud is different, both Matthew and Alex agree. Cloud costs are operational, not capitalised, which requires closer collaboration between finance and technology teams and the adoption of FinOps principles. Yet the flip side is powerful: cloud provides far greater visibility into what each service costs and what value it generates.
Looking back – and forward
Reflecting on lessons learned, both speakers emphasise the importance of mindset. Cloud is not simply “someone else’s data centre”; it represents a fundamentally different operating model. Success requires investment in skills, clearly defined recovery objectives and strong, trust-based supplier relationships.
For Novuna, the move has delivered improved resilience, increased speed and sharper strategic focus. For Alfa, it reinforces the value of a consistent, automated and continuously evolving cloud platform.
The overarching message of the webcast is that cloud confidence comes from combining technology with culture, governance and partnership. When those pieces come together, the result is an operating model that is more resilient, more agile and better aligned with the pace of change in today’s asset finance market.