TUCSON, Ariz. –The $140-million Tucson Old Pueblo CU is reporting the migration of its disaster recovery solution will save it as much as $2,000 per hour. The credit union, which has moved to CUProdigy’s cloud-based disaster recovery as a service (DRaas), arrived at that figure by suing its 2015 operational income and dividing that figure by its annual operating hours.
Prior to the migration, Tucson Old Pueblo said it couldexpect its systems to be down for as long as two days before operations were fully restored, according to Vice President of Information Technology Matthew Beausoleil. That could mean a revenue loss of up to $32,000 , with TOPCU noting that figure doesn’t even include the credit union’s reputational loss that could drive members to move their accounts and loans elsewhere.
Interestingly, noted Tucson Old Pueblo, it doesn’t even operate on CUProdigy’s core system.
The Layton, Utah-based CUSO said it was able to deliver the dramatic improvement through real time replication via state-of-the-art data centers, which replicate transactions and other data seconds after they occur.
Previously, Tuscon Old Pueblo stored servers at a disaster recovery site that required a significant amount of configuration to get up and running. And, because the credit union replicated data overnight, once those servers were online, the data could be between 24 and 48 hours behind, the company noted.
“That’s just unacceptable,” Beausoleil said. “Now, as an IT staff, we can be out there helping our employees serve our members, versus building equipment and trying to get people access to their data.”
The credit union was about to sign a cloud-based disaster recovery deal with another company when it decided to consider CUProdigy, TOPCU reported.
“That would have involved having a piece hardware in our data center, with another one replicated in their data center for disaster recovery. We would have had to buy the hardware for our data center as well as their data center,” Beausoleil said. “Because of the way my virtual host servers are built, I didn’t see the need to have another piece of hardware in my data center for disaster recovery. I have a cluster that runs multiple servers, and we have a lot of redundancy built into our virtual infrastructure.”
Tucson Old Pueblo is CUProdigy’s first cloud-based disaster recovery client that doesn’t operate on its core system; instead, it uses Symitar’s Episys, provided by Member Driven Technologies.
“It’s important for me, working at a credit union, where our motto is people helping people, to be able to go to a CUSO that has a similar culture. That just makes sense to me,” he said.
“The days of carting tapes to a hot site are long gone,” said CUProdigy CEO Anthony Montgomery. “If a disaster strikes today, Tucson Old Pueblo can get back to the business of serving members before those members even realize there was an interruption.”
For info: www.cuprodigy.com.