Edwards Federal Credit Union

Edwards Federal Credit Union is a financial institution with 2 branches, headquartered in Edwards, California, serving over 16,000 members with more than $168 million in assets. Edwards Federal Credit Union was chartered in 1962, originally serving the employees and family of Edwards Air Force Base and now serves the community of the Antelope Valley.

Issue

The credit union’s core systems’ CPU failed. The credit union IT staff spent several hours working with their hardware support vendor to resolve the issue. Hardware support attempted to find a replacement part local with no luck. It was determined the part would need to be shipped from the east coast. The hardware support vendor estimated a minimum of 48 to 72 hours to receive the part, with no guarantee since there was a major snow storm on the east coast and many airports were shut down. Due to the uncertainty of when the part would arrive, the credit union felt it was necessary to declare a disaster to ensure member access to their funds.

Solutions

The credit union contacted IMS to provide a heads up on the situation in case they needed to declare a disaster. IMS staff made the decision to recover the core system at IMS and load the transaction log file in order to expedite the recovery should the credit union decide to declare. Approximately 24 hours after the credit union made the initial call, they were able to determine the part was going to be held up for at least another 48 to 72 hours so they made the decision to declare the disaster. IMS, brought up the VPN tunnel and established communication with the credit union.

Communications with third-party vendors (ATM’s, Internet Banking, etc.) was re-routed between the credit union’s data center and the IMS data center. IMS enabled the credit union’s third-party software on the core using temporary enabling values. A week after declaring the disaster, the credit union received the replacement part and their hardware engineer was able to get the part replaced. The credit union and IMS then coordinated an after-hours switch-over to the credit unions system.

The afternoon of the switch-over, IMS staff backed up the core server at the IMS data center, restored it onto the credit unions core server and ran balancing reports. The credit union validated that everything balanced to the penny. In less than 3 hours, the credit union was transitioned back onto their core server. After two weeks in disaster mode, the credit union was back on their system and it was business as usual.