Santa Clara County Federal Credit Union

Credit Union Case Study

Santa Clara County Federal Credit Union is a financial institution with 6 branches, headquartered in San Jose, California, serving over 45,000 members with more than $587 million in assets. County Federal’s membership is county, city and school employees and the affiliated organizations that support them.

Issue

The credit union’s core Spectrum system lost the operating system. The credit union IT staff spent several hours working with their hardware support vendor to determine the cause. Hardware support attempted multiple times to boot the system up off of its most recent boot tape with no luck. It was determined there was a failure of both internal operating system disk drives. The hardware support vendor estimated 48 hours to replace the drives with no guarantee it would resolve the issue. Additionally, due to communications issues, the offsite transaction logging process had failed to transfer the log file for 6 hours leading up to the system crash.

Solutions

The credit union was using a web product of IMS and the IMS monitoring software notified support staff that the credit union had lost communication with the core. IMS support staff then reached out to the credit union to notify them they were down. The credit union informed IMS that they were aware and explained that they were working with their hardware support vendor to determine the cause and hopefully resolve the issue. IMS asked if the credit union would like to declare a disaster and they chose not to as it was still in the early stages. IMS made the decision to begin the recovery of the core system on IMS’s hardware to expedite the process should the credit union choose to declare. Hours later, the executive team at the credit union made the decision to reach out to IMS and declare a disaster.

IMS staff had already restored the core system and began the process of establishing communications and re-routing third party vendor’s, etc. Within a couple hours, the credit union was up and operational.

The following day, the credit union was able to receive a file of ATM and debit card transactions. IMS programming staff went to work writing a program to re-format the file into a batch format for posting. The program also cross-referenced history to ensure duplicate transactions did not post. By the third day, the credit union had recovered all transactions and was fully balanced.

Prior to the disaster, the credit union was in the process of migrating to an upgraded core server. The consensus was to remain on IMS for the next 40 days and then migrate over to the new server rather than making the move twice. IMS staff worked with the credit union to restore backups onto the new core server and went through the process multiple times to ensure a seamless transition. Prior to the move, the credit union was provided the step by step procedures IMS was going to follow, which the credit union confirmed. The morning of the move, IMS staff backed up the core server at the IMS data center, restored it onto the credit unions new core server and ran balancing reports. The credit union validated that everything balanced to the penny and within 4 hours, the credit union was transitioned back over onto their new core server and it was business as usual.

Location
San Jose, CA

Link
Visit Website

Services Utilized
Core Programming
Disaster Recovery
Backup
Make A Statement
TrialBalance+
Electronic Forms

What the Client is Saying

Discover how we have transformed IT operations for numerous financial institutions, enhancing their efficiency, security, and compliance.

“Not too bad to declare a disaster and our biggest loss is the cost we had to pay our DR vendor. We really appreciate all of the hard work that has gone in to restoring our system and posting the missing transactions.

Let it be known that everyone at our credit union knows the IMS name and what they can do for us.  Keep up the good work.  I am sure we will need your assistance in the future.”

Eric Barnes

VP of Information Technology, Santa Clara County Federal Credit Union

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