Site-Four, a South Dakota-based data center CUSO and member of the cuasterisk.com network, recently completed a full system rollover to its High Availability and Disaster Recovery facility in West Michigan. This 3-day rollover exercise was a planned event to test the ability of offering full services from the newly established disaster recovery location. During the event, services were rolled over from Sunday to Wednesday.

Tim Kenney, Site-Four CIO said, “With each planned event there are unplanned issues that help us harden the procedures and processes that are crucial to help ensure that our 65+ serviced credit unions, crossing five time zones, are able to service their members during several different scenarios.”

As part of an ongoing business continuity program, Site-Four, LLC actively maintains a High Availability (HA) core-processing environment with real-time core processing data replication between identical servers located at two geographically dispersed, state-of-the-art datacenters. These HA rollover events, conducted three to four times per year, are scheduled to redirect core-processing and operations to the secondary/backup datacenter (located in Kentwood, Michigan) for range of 1-7 business days. At the completion of each event, core-processing is redirected back to the primary facility in Yankton, South Dakota.

“It’s not enough that we have a disaster plan; our clients expect us to be able to handle a disaster situation, and that means rigorously and regularly testing our backup capabilities,” concluded Kenney.