POECU is a new user.

"You can buy this stuff all you want, but until you test it, you just have someone's word for it," Parfait said. "So I left our credit union and drove to where I could get an Internet connection at another site, plugged my laptop in, and in less than an hour, I was looking at live data."

The CU's disaster recovery plan now calls for Parfait and another senior executive to evacuate in different directions, then call CUSA and connect to a data switch that restores electronic banking, "so our members have access to their money within three or four hours of when we had to shut down," he says.

"Now I know we won't get caught with our pants down again. And we still do daily backup on tape, of course, because I don't think you can ever really have too much backup," Parfait says.

Pete Day agrees. "We ask every one of our credit unions to do a tape backup," says the director of operations at Utah-based CUSA Technologies. "We have 250 credit unions using our disaster recovery services and already 150 of them have chosen to use EVault in the past year and a half.

"It's very seamless. The credit union just has to have Internet access and we do everything else. It's all encrypted and it requires no downtime on the credit union's part to get started on it," Day says.

In addition to providing emergency backup for a system-wide failure, the EVault system is running alongside the live system, so if a tape drive fails, an individual file can be pulled off the online backup, adding to its value as a maintenance tool, the company says.

Compliance issues and the need to store ever-increasing amounts of data also is driving the company's growing business, said Richard Heitmann, vice president of product marketing for EVault, a Seagate Technology company.

"The amount of data that companies are producing and have to retain for regulatory purposes continues to grow, and the emphasis is now on the entire data life cycle, from creation to archiving to being available for recovery," he said. Data also need to be encrypted and secure, coming and going, the company says.

That's why CUSA turned to a company like EVault to help provide that service, Day said.

"Compliance, business continuity and disaster recovery are integral parts of a credit union's activities today, and an important part of that is data storage and security," the CUSA operations director said.

"Since we're the core provider, our clients come to us for solutions, and we needed one that would be effective and efficient and make sense for credit unions large and small."

CUSA is acting as a re-seller for EVault services and still takes the front-line calls. "It's completely transparent to us," said Parfait at POECU in New Orleans.

EVault (www.evault.com) is based in Emeryville, Calif., and has more than 8,500 customers, about a third of them in financial services, and credit unions "play a big role in what we do," Heitmann said.

The company offers disaster recovery planning and testing and implementation services that include providing daily data backup and emergency restoration through its series of data centers connected to clients by secured virtual private networks (VPNs) over the Internet. That's the service that Day's credit union will rely on again if it has to, says the New Orleans credit union CEO. "It's probably the biggest part of our disaster recovery plan right now," he said. "The term I like is business continuity, and you can't put a dollar ROI on that.

"To me, having the piece of mind that we can handle emergencies, and knowing that we don't expose our credit union to a substantial risk of loss for not being online, and that our members can get to their accounts…that's priceless." –[email protected]