In a world where technology has become intertwined with our daily lives, it is increasingly important to ensure that any potential disruption to IT systems is managed in an efficient and effective manner. IT resilience is a key concept that helps organizations weather the storm of unexpected disruptions.
Disaster recovery is an integral part of IT resilience and ensures that business continuity is maintained during times of crisis. In this article, we will explore what IT resilience means and how disaster recovery fits in.
What is True IT Resilience?
IT resilience is a key component of a successful digital transformation strategy and is often defined as an organization’s ability to ensure business continuity in the face of any obstacle or disruption. Resilience is more than just reacting to issues and strong disaster recovery, though both of these are part of a good IT resilience strategy.
IT resilience encompasses all technology and the actions and reactions that fall under that umbrella. And today, there are a few hallmarks:
- An “always-on” member experience: this means your operations, especially those that are self-service or fully online, are not experiencing significant downtime.
- Mobility of your workload: your IT tools and assets shouldn’t be only accessible or stored in a single environment or physical location. Differentiation here is key
- Agility: cloud options, easy transitions – your solutions should be accessible and easy to update or tweak without much friction.
The goal of a complete IT resilience strategy is to make actions like mergers and acquisitions, cloud transfers, data center changes, system maintenance, and general IT and device upgrades as seamless as possible.
Conversely, actions often require reactions. And unplanned issues that require a specific and targeted response can also help boost resilience. The way your system handles user errors, breaches, failures of infrastructure, natural disasters, and security issues can affect that resilience and, in turn, your credit union’s brand sentiments.
It Starts with Backups and Disaster Recovery
Because you can’t do anything without a secure system, some of the first components of resilience include data backup and IT disaster recovery.
Data loss can be devastating to a business – in fact, nearly 70% of small businesses close within one year of a large data loss event, according to Consoltech. And 1/3 of all folders in an average company are not protected at all.
If you were to lose one in three of your credit union members’ sensitive data, that would not only be terrible for your brand, it would be devastating to those members who trusted you with their data. Because credit unions are so dedicated to protecting and advising credit union members and their financial health, a large breach that results in loss of data can be damning for you and hard on your communities.
That’s why having top-tier data backups and disaster recovery protocols are so important. There are tons of causes of data loss, from improper technology upgrades to natural disasters and user errors.
More than 90% of companies that experience severe data loss never recover. This is not an attempt to scare you, but it is something that your credit union leaders should always be aware of. Nothing in this world is becoming less reliant on technology, and that means your data and programs are holding more and more significance in your business continuity planning.
Planning and Testing
You know what they say about even the best-laid plans – and that is true for your disaster recovery system and other components of an effective IT resilience strategy.
When you are planning your large IT upgrades or switching to a new data backup provider. It’s important to remember that this is an ongoing and evolving landscape you are trying to keep up with. Because of the fluid nature of IT services, your planning is only as good as your testing tells you it is.
Testing your systems, employees, and vendors is vital to your success, especially on the heels of news items like the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank and the growing distrust of financial and other national institutions.
Collaboration is Key
Data resilience can often be bottlenecked by miscommunication between your IT professionals and your credit union’s C-suite executives. Because business continuity is more of a high-level issue, and IT is often seen as the behind-the-scenes work, there are many crucial conversations that are not happening but should be.
Increased communication within departments and staff members has always proven beneficial to the business that chooses to open those lines of communication.
IT protocols and strategies may not be the most exciting conversation starter, but they can’t be implemented successfully if other employees are carrying out tasks in such a way that they undermine those efforts.
Infuse Some IT Resilience with IMSI’s Infuzion Tool
Your credit union and IT functions are not “one size fits all.” And that means your tools shouldn’t be, either. To create great business momentum and capitalize on the IT resilience you’ve built, we’d like to introduce you to Infuzion.
IMSI’s Infuzion tool is created primarily to help credit unions streamline complex functions without having to take the extra time to develop scripts or understand and build Java.
With Infuzion, you can update mass tables quickly, work through inserting, updating, and deleting SQL Queries to KeyBridge, batch format delimited file input, and apply consistent updates to easily modify scripts. Many of these tools are part of a successful IT-resilient strategy.
Talk to our team today about how Infuzion can help your credit union get one step closer to full IT resilience.
