Best Business Continuity Software for Credit Unions

If you tend to believe that using tape and having a paper business continuity plan is good enough for you – than this post isn’t for you.  If however, you believe that technology and software can not only improve your life but also lower risk than read on!

Let’s get started.  While you might have come to the is post because you were thinking of solving a particular problem – the reality is that Business Continuity Software encompasses lots of different software.  It could be that you were trying to create a better Business Continuity Plan or maybe you were looking to replicate data quicker.  Either way – this post should get to the high level overviews of each type of Business Continuity Planning Software.

Categories of Business Continuity Software

If you noticed, there are really two types of Business Continuity Software.  One is aimed at the technology and the second type is about helping you build a plan, notify employees, and use the plan in actual events.   Here are our classifications for each:

Offsite Data Vaulting, Replication, or Backup Software

Ongoing Operations has tested about 100 different business continuity software that claims to do everything from real-time replication to snapshots to nightly backups.  In general we use the following criteria for determining which works best for Financial Institutions:

  • Security (Encryption, Who has access to the data, FFIEC Guidelines, data at rest, data in transit)
  • Recover-ability
  • Test-ability
  • Ongoing Maintenance Required
  • Ease of Installation
  • Affordability

operational resiliencyBased on this classification – we believe that the following solutions are the best.  We are of course a bit biased and recognize some of our rankings are based purely on our need as a business partner to make sure the solution meets the broadest needs as possible.  Occasionally, a client needs to meet a very specific RPO, Recovery Point Objective, or RTO, Recovery Time Objective for a specific system.  In those cases, we may recommend a different solution. Come back in a few weeks or Subscribe to our blog for our follow-up analysis of Business Continuity based Technology Software.

Related Business Continuity Plan Software

CU Recover – Business Continuity Software is our favorite.  We use it for our own planning process and it is even fully integrated with our Board Portal.  The best feature is that it is based on Microsoft SharePoint. This means that everyone in the organization can participate in the planning process, documents are easy to find and share, and the native list structure is very flexible and able to be customized for many clients.

We are working on some comparisons here are a couple that should be done soon:

  • CU Recover vs. Quantivate
  • CU Recover vs. Planet

Crisis Management Notification Software

We have looked at two of these in depth.  Exigent 911 and MIR3.  Ultimately, our customers we found that the majority of our customers couldn’t justify the additional price for MIR3.  Instead they wanted the down and dirty version that could get crucial messages to staff, members and track employees in a Disaster.  Either way – CU Recover works with both.

Incident Management Software

We have actually not ever looked at a full incident management product.  The CU Recover product has the functionality built in using SharePoint’s inherent list structure.  This means that you can pretty much put meta data on every single business continuity plan item whether it be a resource, a plan, a recovery step etc.  Then on the fly pick a scenario or recovery action and CU Recover will produce a unique recovery plan based on the meta data.  For example, you can flag specific recovery steps with a fire scenario, hurricane scenario, or road closure scenario.  Each step can have multiple flags. Then pull up the incident management dashboard – select your flags and CU Recover will resort everything and give you a checklist for recovery.

CHECK BACK 

Come back in a few weeks and we should have finished our review of Business Continuity Software – Data Vaulting, Replication, Core

RELATED POSTS

Business Impact Analysis as part of the Business Continuity Program

Risk Assessments as part of a Business Continuity Program

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