Over the past ninety days, CU*Answers, Inc., a Grand Rapids, Michigan-based cooperative CUSO, has helped four credit unions perform planned rollovers to backup servers as part of their overall business resiliency strategy.  Each credit union utilizes the CUSO’s CU*BASE^® core data processing suite in an in-house deployment.  During the test, each credit union switched from its production core server to its redundant high availability server for one to three days, a period that was long enough to ensure thorough testing of their disaster recovery and business resumption processes.  Following testing, production was rolled back to its original state seamlessly.

“We strongly encourage each of our self-processing credit unions to perform production rollover tests on an annual basis,” said Jody Karnes, Chief Information Officer at CU*Answers.  “These tests allow both the credit union and our support team to do a thorough assessment of the process and plug any gaps that are identified.  We apply what we learn managing our online environment for more than 180 credit unions so that our in-house owners are able to leverage within their own data centers.”

Ms. Karnes concluded by saying, “The one thing we have learned by doing multiple annual tests for our online business is that disaster recovery planning is a journey.  We learn something new with every project, and sharing those experiences with our in-house customer-owners helps them prepare effectively for an unplanned outage.”

CU*Answers and its self-processing credit unions operate on IBM POWER® servers running the IBM i operating system, the most widely deployed platform in the banking world.