The path of destruction left behind from Texas to the US Virgin Islands created by a repeated cycle of hurricanes this season has many credit unions rethinking their current disaster recovery and business continuity strategies.

For most financial institutions who rely heavily on services from industry partners and third-party vendors, the strength of your network when the storms make landfall determine to a large extent how you will respond and how quickly you will recover operations.

This was the case for Harris County Federal Credit Union, located in Houston, Texas. When the news that Hurricane Harvey was headed their way, they engaged their network to quickly and effectively recover their technology, including both core-processing and local area networks, at multiple colocation hot-sites through agreements with cuasterisk.com partners Site-Four in Yankton, South Dakota, and with CU*Answers and Xtend in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Through their vendor relationships, credit union staff were able to remain with families throughout the storm (whether that meant remaining at home or evacuating to a safe location), knowing that teams over 900 miles away were busy restoring their technology so that members had access to ATMs and shared branch locations, as well as home and mobile banking to access their accounts when they needed it the most. Even though the physical credit union branch was not accessible due to the storm, the virtual credit union branch was open for business.

“Perhaps the most underestimated resource required for a recovery effort is skilled personnel,” states Jim Lawrence, vice president of business continuity at CU*Answers. “We often make the risky assumption that the staff responsible for a recovery will be available when disaster strikes. In this case, not only were staff spread across the region trying to escape the storm and rising flood waters, travel to the recovery hot-site was not an option. As a full-service CUSO partner, we were able to orchestrate the coordinated effort across multiple teams from recovering the technology and data needed as well as providing call center services so that members could talk with a real person for help, instead of getting a recording that the credit union was closed.”

For this credit union, all of the planning, testing, and investing with the right business partners helped them continue to serve their members, even through a hurricane.