"We only have to grow a little piece of our infrastructure now as we grow, and with them doing the due diligence and operating backup from several sites it really takes the issue of natural disasters, in our case tornadoes, away from us and helps us breathe a little easier," Dubey says.

Down on the Florida Gulf Coast, tropical weather is more of a concern for $213 million Sarasota Coastal Credit Union, which had been working with a large DR provider before deciding to switch to its core processor for the crucial backup service. "We did our due diligence. We went to Troy and went through all the motions. They say their recovery time is four hours and they mean it. It's four hours or less," says Mike Boker, vice president of IS at Sarasota Coastal.

One major key to rapid backup is the fact that the in-house credit unions already are backing up their data every 10 minutes around the clock to three GalaxyPlus data centers in Michigan and Texas, "so their data is always resident and the only data that would be affected would be that from the last 10 minutes," says Dave Reed, GalaxyPlus product manager.

Storing data that way instead of relying on the traditional system of locating and shipping tapes that had been stored off site allows GalaxyPlus to "pre-stage all those key processes so the only thing we have to do is throw a switch, figuratively speaking, and you're back up and running," adds Francone, the GalaxyPlus senior vice president. Credit unions also have a range of options for connecting to the data centers, including VPN, frame relay and MPLS pathways. To supplement the technology, the Fiserv unit also is working with PSCU for contact center services and business continuity specialist Strohl Systems to offer client credit unions a step-by-step plan for dealing with disaster. Dubey at Weokie says his credit union is "looking real hard" at the Strohl option, and Boker at Sarasota Coastal says his credit union is involved in shared services and appreciates knowing that it can offer account access at other credit unions if a big storm scatters the membership. Especially after going through the past couple of hurricane seasons, "it's good to know that we only have to make a phone call and within four hours our members our going to have our services," Boker says. "It normally takes eight hours just to fly out somewhere, if you can even get a flight in those situations. It really takes a big burden off us."

There's no shortage of companies offering disaster recovery services, including a number of specialists, so why go with their core processor?

"They're the folks who designed our system. They're the ones who built it. They know our operation to the core," says Dubey at Weokie. "For us it was pretty much a slam dunk." –[email protected]