Montana Native Growth Fund

Before and after

1. Recommended approachStrategy

   The guiding principle was to eliminate risk by eliminating surface area. Every component MNGF would otherwise have to patch, monitor, renew, or pay for became a candidate for removal.

   We recommended a fully managed, serverless architecture over any self-hosted alternative. That single decision closed out the majority of the risk profile at once: no operating system to patch, no database to secure, no plugin ecosystem to monitor, no server capacity to size or pay for during quiet months.

   The strategy rested on four commitments:

   Managed over self-hosted. Hosting, TLS, CDN, and CMS infrastructure all shift to providers with dedicated security teams. MNGF inherits that posture instead of trying to reproduce it.

   Static-first delivery with edge distribution. Pre-rendered content served from a global edge network removes the origin server from the critical path for nearly every request. This is the performance answer and the availability answer at the same time, which matters when your users are on rural mobile connections.

   A hard server-side boundary for sensitive data. Loan inquiry handling runs server-side, with credentials held in the platform secret store and never exposed to the client. Applicant data transits to Salesforce and is not retained by the platform.

   Operational ownership transferred, not retained. Success was defined as MNGF running day-to-day operations without calling us. Structured content tooling, written runbooks, and hands-on training were scoped as deliverables from the start, not as an afterthought at handoff.

   We deliberately avoided architecture that would have made MNGF dependent on a retainer for basic operation. The support relationship exists for governance and improvement, not because the platform cannot run without us.

2. How the work movedDelivery process

   The engagement ran as a structured consulting delivery with defined phases, each closing on a documented decision or artifact.

   Phase 1 — Discovery and risk assessment

   We began by mapping MNGF's mission, operating constraints, and technical reality. That included the existing domain and hosting footprint, the Salesforce environment already in use, staff technical capacity, and the rural connectivity conditions their community actually faces. The phase closed with a documented risk profile covering availability, data exposure, domain security, and operational continuity. Those findings drove every subsequent decision.

   Phase 2 — Architecture and strategy

   We evaluated self-hosted and managed options against MNGF's risk profile and, critically, their capacity to maintain what we left behind. The serverless, edge-distributed model was selected because it removed the largest categories of risk and recurring cost at once. The architecture, the integration boundary for Salesforce, and the DNS hardening plan were documented and approved before implementation began.

   Phase 3 — Cloud foundation and pipeline

   We provisioned the managed hosting environment and established the Git-backed CI/CD pipeline first, so every later change flowed through a controlled path. Preview environments, atomic production deployments, and rollback were in place before any content or integration work started.

   Phase 4 — DNS, TLS, and domain hardening

   Authoritative DNS was consolidated under documented ownership. Records were audited and stale entries removed. HTTPS was enforced with automated certificate lifecycle management and HSTS, and registrar transfer lock was enabled. Email authentication policy was reviewed to reduce lookalike phishing risk against MNGF's borrower community.

   Phase 5 — Application and content platform build

   The Next.js application was implemented with static pre-rendering for program and education content. Sanity was configured as a structured content backend modeled on MNGF's actual programs, with validation rules and role-based permissions so staff could publish safely within their own scope.

   Phase 6 — Secure Salesforce integration

   The loan inquiry path was built server-side with credentials held in the encrypted secret store, input validated and sanitized on the server, and no applicant data persisted by the platform. The boundary was tested end to end against MNGF's Salesforce environment before release.

   Phase 7 — Performance and load verification

   We verified delivery performance across devices and simulated constrained connection speeds representative of rural mobile access, then tuned caching, image optimization, and payload size against those results rather than against ideal-network assumptions.

   Phase 8 — Monitoring and alerting

   Uptime checks, deployment health monitoring, and error alerting were configured and routed before launch, so the platform was observable from its first day in production rather than after its first incident.

   Phase 9 — Documentation, training, and handoff

   Architecture documentation, the DNS and access registers, operational runbooks, and the editorial guide were delivered alongside hands-on staff training. Cutover to production at nativegrowthfund.org was executed with rollback available throughout.

   Phase 10 — Post-launch stabilization and ongoing support

   We monitored closely through the initial production period, confirmed integration and alerting behavior under real traffic, and transitioned into an ongoing support relationship focused on governance and improvement rather than routine maintenance.

3. After launchCurrent status and ongoing support

   The platform is live and in active managed support. Monitoring runs continuously with alerts routed to a defined escalation path, so availability, deployment health, and the Salesforce integration are observed rather than assumed.

   Our ongoing work focuses on governance and improvement: periodic security and access reviews, secret rotation on a defined cadence, DNS and certificate oversight, dependency updates applied through the standard pipeline with preview verification, and cloud cost review to confirm spend stays proportional to use.

   MNGF staff continue to own day-to-day content operations independently. That was the point. The architecture requires no routine maintenance from them and no standing intervention from us to stay online.

   As MNGF's lending, financial education, and homeownership programs expand, the infrastructure scales without re-platforming. We remain available as their cloud and security advisory partner for new integrations, added programs, and any change to their compliance or capacity requirements.