SAN DIEGO -
“We didn’t realize what a gem we had,” said Cathie Legaspi, AVP-application systems at the $700-million credit union. “During the (Southern California) fires, we had access to electronic versions of teller vouchers and loan documents via VPN connections, even though we were blocked from the headquarters building. We were able to complete our COLD process and system reports as normal, as well.”
Fires Close 8 Branches
Employees at operational branches could also access electronic documents while the fires raged near the USA FCU headquarters.
Of the credit union’s 22 international locations, eight were temporarily closed because of the fires, said USA Federal CIO Carolyn James.
In 2003, USA Federal started using the OnBase enterprise content management software suite, provided by Hyland Software, as a “place for COLD documents and for loan processing,” said Legaspi.
Over the years, OnBase has taken its rightful place next to the core processing system as a critical piece of the CU’s BCP, added James.
“Our strategy for business recovery deals primarily with our host system, and I consider document management part of core processing,” she said. “You can’t have one without the other.
Goal: Less Reliance On Paper
“Our goal is to get all of our key documents stored and maintained in OnBase so that we don’t have to rely on paper to access them during a disaster,” she continued.
“No one knows when disaster will hit, so it’s good to have document management in place as one of the backbones of a BCP,” agreed Dave Vegh, financial services manager at Westlake, Ohio-based Hyland.
Several Lessons Learned
Beyond seeing the document management system pass its first real-world continuity test, USA FCU also learned a bit about authentication during the fires, James said.
“Access to some of our key accounting functions requires hardware tokens, and those were in one of the buildings that was closed,” she explained. “And some PCs are mapped directly to the Fed via IP address, and those PCs were in one of the buildings that closed.”
Without the hardware tokens and the mapped PCs, the accounting department couldn’t fully operate, said James.
“So, we’ve decided to set up PCs with access to the Fed at five other branches, and we’ll authenticate with a user name and password in the event of a future disaster,” James explained.
James is anxious to bolster her document back-up strategy, as well. Whereas the host system is replicated between two servers in real-time, OnBase is only backed up once a day to Storage Area Network tapes.
“If our building were to blow up we wouldn’t be able to recover all of our documents,” James said.
And the fires underscored the need to make sure every last piece of paper is scanned and stored in OnBase, said James.
No More Arguments
“We weren’t enforcing the scanning on some lingering documents,” she said. “Now that they’ve seen the potential of a disaster situation, the end-users aren’t arguing about getting everything scanned.”
James also plans to use the OnBase Workflow system to help take employees step-by-step through unfamiliar tasks during a disaster if they have to step-in for an employee who routinely performs the task.
USA Federal employees were not injured during the fires, and credit union buildings did not sustain damage, James said.
The credit union had finished a round of BCP drills just weeks before the disaster hit, she said.
FOR MORE RESOURCES
Read more about business continuity tools at cujournal.com and search the following bolded terms in the archive:
Dangerous Data Security Myths: Get Them Before They Get You, on why credit unions shouldn’t rely on their data processors to get them through a disaster.
CUs Do IT With SaaS, on how a comprehensive software-as-a-service offerings can also act as disaster recovery services.
How One CU Gets Two Servers For The Price Of One Using Virtualization, on the business continuity provided by Vermont State Employees CU’s virtual servers.
For info on this story:
* www.usafedcu.org
* www.onbase.com
