Business Challenges: Threat of lengthy system downtime; complicated and time-consuming testing

System downtime is a fact of life for businesses. If your organization hasn’t yet experienced it, rest assured that it someday will, and the impact could be devastating. But William Brown isn’t about to let that happen to Arizona-based First American Credit Union, an organization whose sterling reputation has been more than 50 years in the making.

“System downtime may be an inevitability for any organization, but in the financial services industry, it’s also unacceptable,” said Brown, who is the technology systems manager at First American. “Our members depend on our ability to provide secure, uninterrupted service.”

And so, First American delivers. However, Brown is not one to take chances, and he felt First American’s legacy disaster recovery system wouldn’t be able to easily meet the organization’s needs in the event of a large disaster. After all, a couple of minor episodes of downtime already had some impact on business as usual.

“We had to repair the Exchange database on at least two different occasions because we didn’t have a good backup in place,” he said. “There were other issues as well. Our backup system would take full base images every time Windows updates were installed and sometimes randomly, which made offsite uploads with the Internet not possible. And Windows Server 2012 R2 was not supported.”

Testing was another thorn in Brown’s side. He recalled that testing took only about 30 minutes for smaller servers and two hours for the larger ones. But about 60 percent of the time after performing full bare metal restores of Exchange, the server would not boot and couldn’t be fixed, even though everything was installed correctly.