DISASTER RECOVERY: Dress Rehearsals Reveal Holes
When Farmington (Connecticut USA) Savings Bank (FSB) staged a mock disaster affecting a branch, back office operations, as well as accounting and lending, the post-mortem on its disaster recovery plan revealed weaknesses the plans’ creators couldn’t have anticipated.
“If more than 10 people were on the phone, then the satellite link suffered,” says Jeffrey McGinnis, FSB’s VP of information systems. “Also, the slow bandwidth affected printing of documents stored on our disaster recovery servers, as well as email synchronization with these servers, particularly if 10-12 people were trying to synchronize emails simultaneously.”
To conduct the business continuity test, FSB, a $1 billion mutual savings bank with 13 branches in central Connecticut, had its recovery provider, Agility Recovery Solutions, supply a trailer with a generator, 20 PCs, two servers, a fax, printer and a 512Kbps satellite voice-and-data link. “We simulated processing transactions via satellite to the mainframe and servers at our disaster recovery site,” McGinnis says.
See DISASTER RECOVERY: Dress Rehearsals Reveal Holes, by Robin Arnfield. Bank Technology News, May 2009
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An unexercised contingency plan could be worse than no plan at all!
Be sure to read Disaster Recovery Testing: Exercising Your Contingency Plan, Philip Jan Rothstein, FBCI, Editor for valuable tips, techniques and insights.
