What is resiliency and what does it have to do with my credit union disaster recovery plans?
by: Mark Komnik
By pure definition, resilience is the ability to become strong, healthy, or successful again after something bad happens. And when you place it in the context of business continuity planning, it refers to the ability of your credit union to be able to adapt to disruptions while maintaining continuous business operations, as well as keeping the damage to your credit union’s reputation, assets, and people to a minimum.
The ideal solution for ensuring business continuity resiliency would be to have a “warm” or “hot” secondary data center. During an event, operations could failover to the backup site and your credit union could recover quickly. However, that solution is not always a practical option for smaller institutions, as it can be very expensive. An alternative solution to a secondary data center could be to maintain some or all of your systems in a “cloud” solution, such as Ongoing Operations. With either solution though, third-party vendors (i.e. ATM, online banking, credit card, etc.) are a critical piece of the Disaster Recovery Plan. Involving third-party vendors in your business continuity planning and testing process can help your resiliency by ensuring they’ll be there when they’re needed most. But what’s the best way to incorporate your third-party vendors into your plan?
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