Cloud confidence: how Novuna gains speed, resilience and focus with Alfa Cloud

Summary

Cloud resilience has become a defining issue for financial services. With outages making headlines and regulators tightening expectations, many lenders are questioning how best to secure their core platforms while accelerating change.

In the recent Finance Connect webcast, “Cloud Confidence – How Novuna Gains Speed, Resilience and Focus with Alfa Cloud”, moderator Christoph Auerbach (Invigors) speaks with Matthew Colville-Foley, Head of Change Delivery at Novuna Business Finance, and Alex Barnes, Director of Cloud Hosting at Alfa, to explore Novuna’s move to Alfa Cloud, a managed cloud platform, and the value it has unlocked.

Escaping the constraints of legacy technology

Novuna’s journey began with an increasingly fragile technology stack. At Novuna, Alfa System ran on niche hardware and an outdated operating system, and maintaining it demanded heavy annual cycles of patching and upgrades. Entire months were lost each year simply keeping the platform stable rather than improving it.

Matthew describes how 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 their own cloud environment, they would still need to recruit and train people with entirely new cloud competencies.

A broader strategic shift was occurring at the same time. The organisation had already accepted that its future did not lie in running a data centre, a conviction reinforced during Covid when their core data centre provider came close to failure. That moment made the question of resilience sharply real and accelerated Novuna’s determination to move to a fully cloud-based model.

It was against this backdrop that Alfa Cloud emerged as the natural solution. Rather than duplicating cloud expertise internally, Novuna opted to have the software provider itself host, manage and support the core platform. The benefits were immediate: fewer unique configurations, fewer unknown dependencies and a partner already invested in maintaining the platform at scale.

The Alfa Cloud model: consistency, speed and continuous improvement

From Alfa’s perspective, the shift to cloud has transformed both how they operate and what they can offer customers. Public cloud platforms, Alex notes, give Alfa the ability to scale infrastructure easily, tap into rapidly advancing database and integration technologies and push new capabilities, including AI-driven features, much faster than in the past.

A defining feature of Alfa Cloud is its single-tenant but highly standardised architecture. Every customer runs in an isolated environment, but the underlying components – databases, services, versions, security layers – follow a consistent blueprint. The result is a step change in support responsiveness. When something goes wrong, Alfa’s teams no longer have to spend hours unpicking the infrastructure just to understand what they are dealing with; they already know how it is built.

Migration approaches differ depending on the customer. Some can lift and shift an existing Alfa version into the cloud with minimal disruption. Others, like Novuna, combine the move with a significant version upgrade. For new customers, Alfa provides ready-configured templates and standards-based integrations to accelerate time to value.

Resilience for a new regulatory era

Operational resilience formed the second major pillar of the discussion. The question Auerbach posed to Matthew was simple: did Novuna feel more resilient now it was on Alfa Cloud? The 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.

On Alfa’s side, resilience is being pushed a step further through its Data Guardian framework. The idea is not merely to withstand outages but to recover from them with speed and predictability. Alfa uses infrastructure-as-code to rebuild entire customer environments automatically and consistently, drawing on replicated data stored across regions and even across different 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.

Regulators are increasingly focused on understanding how firms recover, not just whether they can. Alfa responds to this by sharing detailed testing evidence with customers, giving risk and compliance teams the visibility they need to meet FCA and DORA expectations.

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 emphasised that Novuna’s approach is multi-layered: they assess not just Alfa but also the suppliers Alfa depends on.

But technical risk is only part of the story. Both speakers underline that 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.

This observation resonated with the audience poll, which indicated that many firms remain only “somewhat confident” in their disaster recovery capabilities. The webcast highlighted that resilience is not just a technical capability; it is an organisational one that relies on relationships as much as architecture.

Refocusing talent and unlocking business value

The final theme of the discussion concerned what Novuna’s cloud journey has meant for its people and its ability to deliver change. Far from making staff redundant, the move has enabled Novuna to reshape its operating model around platform and product teams.

Employees formerly tied to maintaining legacy infrastructure are now moving into modern roles such as platform engineering, cloud architecture, data engineering and automation. This transition has been supported with structured career pathways and investment in new skills.

The benefits have already materialised. Novuna has reduced its business-as-usual IT costs, retired services that existed only to support the old stack and gained immediate access to legacy data through cloud dashboards and analytics. Importantly, this new agility allows Novuna to respond more quickly to customer expectations and regulatory pressures.

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 highlighted the importance of mindset. Cloud is not “someone else’s data centre”; it is a fundamentally different operational model. Organisations must invest in the right skills, define clear recovery objectives and build strong supplier relationships grounded in trust and transparency.

For Novuna, the move has delivered not only improved resilience but also speed and strategic focus. For Alfa, it has reinforced 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.

Watch the full webcast on-demand here.