Top disaster recovery tech trends for 2014

Well it’s that time of year where everyone and their mother writes articles about their predictions about 2014.  In sticking with that trend we thought an article about the top technology trends in Credit Union Disaster Recovery made a lot of sense.   Things have changed a lot since I first started working in Credit Unions.  No longer do we use tapes and rebuild servers from scratch.  No longer do we have to get ISDN lines or multiplexers working.  That being said the complexity and challenges related to recovering am modern credit union are plentiful.  To that end – here are some trends that should make you smile.

RPOs and RTOs getting Faster

Each year the speed that we can recover servers at (either physical or virtual) gets faster and faster.  As the technology and bandwidth allowing for faster replication continues to improve and get cheaper – the prospect of quick recoveries and more resiliency continue to improve.  Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives are key to making sure you can recover from a multitude of threats.

DDOS

Recently, our research came across a service that you could rent servers to conduct DDOS attacks by the minute.  You could easily scale up the servers to create a massive attack for a few hundred dollars.  In addition, it takes about 5 minutes of poking around to find everything you need to disable a credit unions third party connections, phones, internet, etc.   As this method of silent protest continues to get cheaper and easier to deploy – credit unions need to improve their security tools to both have the visibility and ammunition to fight off sophisticated threats.

Integrated Technologies

More and more integrated technologies are making the disaster recovery world simpler.  Things like SIP trunks or blended BGP internet mean that your phones and internet services can be much more resilient. SIP Trunks enable all of your voice traffic to route over your internet circuits.  Gone are the days where you have separate voice and data for two reasons.  First, SIP Trunks are much less expensive than legacy PRIs.  Second, while the internet has small outages – in our experience they are much shorter than if your PRI has a problem.  Blended BGP enables your internet to be much more reliable as it combines multiple providers into one stream. Any one or two providers can go down and things automatically adjust and route appropriately.  When you combine BGP and SIP you get a much more stable and consistent connectivity package for all of your credit unions communication purposes.  The down side is that the expertise and technical capabilities required to maintain this configuration will also increase, but in our experience the benefits far out way the costs.   We also saw a huge step forward this year with being able to imbed a backup 4G wireless VPN into your branch MPLS network for very little money.  This enables your branches to stay up even when you are experiencing network or performance problems.   All in all, as credit unions leverage the internet and cloud infrastructure more and more they constantly see an improving Business Continuity world.

Put them all together and Ongoing Operations continues to be very excited about the ability to help credit unions achieve more consistent, reliable, and faster recoveries in almost all aspects of their technology infrastructure.