By Kirk Drake | August 19, 2013

Top 5 Considerations for Credit Union Backups

Most Credit Unions have already evaluated and moved to online backups.  Some are even on their second or third generation of online backup software.  Whether this is your first rodeo or your third – Ongoing Operations has reviewed and tested lots of different software and have determined the following to be the key essential things to consider when assessing your Credit Union backups:

Encryption

If you work for a Credit Union than you know – this is the most important component.  Any backups need to be encrypted and you need to make sure that you control who has access to your data.  Some options enable you to encrypt and for the supplier to decrypt the data.  Some just have you use a VPN to send the data encrypted.  In our opinion, the best option is to pick a software or solution that enables the Credit Union to set its own encryption key and for the Credit Union to be the only one who can decrypt the data.  This is the most secure scenario and ensures that your member’s data is always protected and you are always NCUA compliant.

 WAN Transport

It is one thing to backup your data locally.  However, if you want to get it offsite and to your hotsite – we highly recommend evaluating your WAN transport software.  Many solutions include this (the OGO Replicator solution does…) but not all.  Ultimately, the quality of this software can greatly impact your cost and reliability of the solution, so don’t overlook its importance.  You need to be able to efficiently transmit both full and incremental backups offsite at least once a day.  The software needs to be able to be set so that you don’t drown your available bandwidth and you will need something that is probably better than simply using TCP/IP.  Something that uses UDP is a good choice as it can use the available bandwidth much more significantly.  Finally, the WAN transport software needs to be able to validate that your data got where it was supposed to go and be easily stopped and started.  Your transmissions will undoubtedly be interrupted occasionally and without good functionality you will find yourself regularly restarting transmissions and resending data that has already been sent.

 RPO

Recovery Point Objective – make sure you know how often you need to take backups and if your software can keep up.  If you have a 15 minute RPO then your software will need to be able to take snapshots of your servers every 15 minutes AND get that data offsite every 15 minutes.   Click here for more information on RPOs.

 RTO

Recovery Time Objectives are the yang to the RPO yin.  Taking the backup is of course important.  But if you cannot restore and use the data in a desirable amount of time it isn’t very helpful.   Old tape based backup systems really had two or three day RTOs.  Current ones can get down into 5 or 10 minutes pretty easily.  The software should be able to boot directly from the backup and deliver BMR or bare metal restores.  This means you can avoid first building the server and then restoring the data.  Modern software combines these functions and makes recovery much faster and more predictable.

 Full System Capabilities

As stated above in the RTO section – you want a software that takes a full snapshot of the server.  Not just the data.  The software should be able to take incremental snapshots and just transmit the changes.  When combined together the full system backup + the incremental snapshots should enable you to rebuild the whole server on a new piece of hardware quickly and efficiently.

Other Considerations

In addition to the above topics, you may also want to look at things like support for virtualized environments, real-time replication support, and possibly deduplication software.  In our experience when you start adding these features you will need to get much more granular and it will eliminate many options and choices.   In addition, support for these functions often break other features above.  For example, it is currently impossible in our experience to get good encryption and deduplication software in the same solution.  In addition, we haven’t found anything yet that can handle virtual server level backup along with replication.  They can do one but  not the other.

Hopefully this blog helped you evaluate new or existing backup solutions you may be using.  If you would iike additional information check out our related posts below:

What is Off Site Backup?

How Will Offsite Data Vaulting Improve Our Disaster Recovery Test?

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