Disaster Planning: Two easy steps and a small table

As hurricane season approaches, we’re reminded of a fact we enjoy not thinking about: that we’re seeing increased frequency in extreme weather events. When is the last time you asked yourself if your credit union is effectively and engagingly planning for the unthinkable? If it’s been a while, now is the time to take stock of your plans.

Don’t have a formal incident response plan, and relying instead on department-centric processes that are already in place? While that may seem like a fine start to disaster planning, it’s important to note that these distributed, department-centric processes frequently lack coordination—and can bring great risk in times of crisis.

Imagine a departmental process of backing up data to a shared drive that is executing at the same time the network folks are conducting reroutes or moving processing to a hot site. Each process might work seamlessly in a vacuum, but when competing for shared resources such as servers, networks, storage or apps, they may fail. The best time to discover such issues is not when the water is rising in the data center.

 

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