First American Credit Union Banks on Quorum for Business Continuity

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

The Solution:
Quorum’s hybrid cloud/ DRaaS
solution ensures business continuity
and testing simplicity

Brown decided to launch into a full fledged search for the perfect disaster recovery and business continuity solution. He researched a few options, including Unitrends and Cloudworks’ Ongoing Operations, but was sold on Quorum after finding it through Spiceworks.

Now Quorum is protecting five of First American’s servers. “The Quorum solution is a true DR solution with the ability to access all servers at the DR location remotely in minutes,” said Brown. “If our primary site goes offline for any reason, our It administrator will be alerted.”

The Impact:
Backup and restore, testing has never
been easier or more reliable

Since installation in mid-April 2014, Brown has had no complaints. “We’ve tested the solution and it’s all worked very well,” he said. “I love being able to boot a virtual clone of any protected node if we have any software or hardware problems with our production servers.”

Brown uses the Test Network mode to test Windows updates and patches on virtual clones of First American’s servers in the middle of the day to work out bugs or problems before they are installed on the production servers. “This ability limits unnecessary downtime for staff — and means I won’t have to spend extra hours away from my family,” Brown said.

This, in addition to Quorum’s amazing support staff, has made quite an impression on Brown. “Quorum is ideal for any midmarket organization especially in financial services— looking to protect the assets of the organization and maintain business continuity,” he concluded. And you can take that testimony to the bank.