MiddConn Federal Credit Union is a small credit union that services members from a large building that is susceptible to power outages. “Every time a storm comes through Middletown, our power goes out,” said Barbara Thorpe, CEO. “It might be off for a few seconds or minutes, but it always happens.” After-storm procedures became routine for Barbara and her team and as their system continued to reboot the stress of a full system crash minimized. Finally, a major storm hit during late summer on a Wednesday night into Thursday morning. When Barbara returned to MiddConn in the morning at 8 a.m. the system would not turn on and panic set in. (Download the full testimonial HERE)

It is moments like these that the hard work you put into creating a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan, and the due diligence in choosing vendors for your credit union core and IT systems that are capable of handling disasters, pays off.  According to enCompass Group's Credit Union IT Compliance Blog:

• 95.7% of credit union respondents test their business continuity plans annually
• 4.3% test their BCP's twice per year.
• 32.1% of credit unions responding had to put their disaster recovery plans into action.

Nearly one third of credit unions have had to use their Disaster Recovery Plans

MiddConn FCU with Barbara at the helm had prepared well for such a disaster by activating two critical FLEX products that are designed for such a scenario. The first is FLEX VAULT that stores daily financial data in protected FLEX data vaults in case the data is erased from the main system. The other is FLEX’s Disaster Recovery product that enlists FLEX to proactively work with the credit union to ensure that disasters are a rare occurrence, including annual onsite disaster recovery tests.

According to Joshua Cicon, if credit unions have the correct services, FLEX can have them back up and running in no time. If, for some reason the credit union has not employed the products, FLEX can usually restore the information but it takes much longer to rebuild data than bring forward stored data that is actively updated on a regular basis.

Read the Testimonial - When Disaster Happens: One Small Credit Union in Connecticut Tells All

This testimonial shares the story of how FLEX's product set assists credit unions in not only disaster preparedness, but in recovery should a catastrophe strike.