Dress Rehearsals Reveal Holes

When Farmington 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."