Calcite Credit Union in Rogers City, Michigan recently worked with the Business Continuity and Imaging Solutions teams at CU*Answers, the credit union’s core data processor and CUSO partner, to both review and test their imaging solutions business continuity plan. The $67 million-credit union shut down their imaging server and ran the credit union without it for an hour to stress test the effectiveness of their continuity plans and to see if they successfully mitigated the risks of a server outage to member service.

Calcite Credit Union CEO Barbara Mills said: “Our imaging solutions are an important process in our daily operations. This test was important to really know if we were prepared. It’s one thing to have a disaster recovery plan; it’s another to apply it in a live situation. We were happy to report that the test was successful with no interruption to operations.”

Little did the credit union know that the very next week their communication line between branches would go down and they would have to put those same procedures into practice. When the line went down eliminating access to their imaging server from the branch, staff at the branch were prepared and replicated what they had done during the test the week before, continuing to serve members without incident.

“With imaging solutions moving from the back office to the front line, it’s more and more critical that credit unions are prepared to address operations in the event of an outage,” said John Beauchamp, VP of Imaging Solutions at CU*Answers. “Calcite Credit Union did exactly what all credit unions should do by testing their plans, and it paid off for them.”