On January 24, 2013, CU*Answers, a 100% credit union-owned CUSO, held an annual corporate “Continuity Awareness Day” as part of their business continuity awareness and training program to help demonstrate the commitment at all levels for emergency response and continuity planning. For the purpose of this day, all staff at each of the three datacenter locations wore color-coded T-shirts with “CONTINTUITY RESPONSE TEAM” printed on the back and the name of their specific recovery team printed on the front.
Colors represented included:
- BLACK: Incident Manager
- RED: First Line Responders and Crisis Communications
- BLUE: Technology Recovery Teams (6)
- GREEN: Business Recovery Teams (6)
Business continuity awareness and training is a part of daily operations at CU*Answers from new employee orientation and regular employee education classes to high availability production rollover exercises and annual disaster recovery tests. No one is exempt from knowing their roles and responsibilities in the event of an outage.
One of the key takeaways from “Continuity Awareness Day” came from a staff member who acknowledged the use of the term RESPONSE Team printed on the backs of each T-shirt rather than REACTION Team. “That one word can make all the difference during an effective and efficient recovery effort” states Jim Lawrence, CBCP, Manager of Disaster Recovery and Business Resumption Services at CU*Answers. He adds:
- REACTION relies on automatic reflexes, does not consider options, and often makes the situation worse.
- RESPONSE considers the big picture, is aligned with predetermined objectives, and recognizes choices and their consequences.
Additional information regarding the CU*Answers Disaster Recovery and High Availability programs can be found at http://www.cuanswers.com/bcp/