The United States was dealt some billion-dollar blows in 2012,what with tornadoes, hurricanes, and, of course, Superstorm Sandy.Businesses, including credit unions and other financialinstitutions, were not exempt from the fallout. And for those withno disaster recovery plan in place, the downtime was particularlydevastating: Aberdeen Group estimates that just an hour of downtimecan translate to $74,000 lost for some small to mid-sizedbusiness.

Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, but given these consistentreminders to expect the unexpected, foresight can be 20/20 too.With a no-fail disaster recovery plan and some regular testing of aproven solution, credit unions can weather any disaster and protecttheir all-important data, applications and systems from certaindestruction.

Prepare Your Team

Credit union employees play a big part in any successfuldisaster recovery plan, so make sure your team is organized andready when disaster strikes. First, determine how you willcommunicate with staff. Reroute phone calls or set up a specialnumber that staff can call for updates after a disaster. Next, runthrough scenarios and outline priorities for day one, day two andso on. These drills will help your team focus in a chaoticsituation.

Choose Your Solution Wisely

While ensuring some type of disaster recovery solution is inplace is of paramount importance, exactly which one a credit unionchooses is often just as critical, as not all solutions deliver theinstant recovery required to avoid costly downtime.

For example, while standalone tape and disk backup arehistorically popular choices, their expense and complexity, not tomention their failure to restore data, applications and systems ina timely fashion (they can take hours or even days), make themless-than-ideal choices for credit unions and financialinstitutions.

For those who want to move away from tape or disk, the cloudemerges as yet another choice for disaster recovery. But when usedalone, cloud backup can actually make recovery times worse forsmall to mid-sized businesses with limited Internet bandwidth. Inreality, large restores from cloud backup require shipping ofphysical media, which defeats the purpose of moving from offsitetape to cloud anyhow.

Because of the inability to get staff working again in minutesrather than days, these solutions are increasingly losing ground tocost-effective and easy-to-use and -deploy hybrid cloud solutions,which, in contrast, deliver instant recovery of data, applicationsand systems by blending on-site with cloud-based recovery.

Test Regularly and Often

Testing your chosen disaster recovery solution is anothercritical element in a credit union's overall disaster recoveryplan. Unfortunately, it typically falls by the wayside. In fact, aSymantec survey found that only about 28% of small to mid-sizedbusinesses in any industry regularly test their solution. This islikely because testing is notoriously time-intensive andcumbersome, taking as long as 48 hours in some cases.

But here again, all solutions are not created equal. Tape anddisk backup solutions have limited to no testing capabilities,while hybrid cloud disaster recovery simplifies and streamlines theprocess through automatic and on-demand testing.

2013 presents another year of unexpected disasters, whether afreak storm or facilities fire. But with the proper disasterrecovery plan in place — which involves people, processes andtechnology — destruction and downtime will be limited, and creditunions can move forward with serving their customers andmaintaining business as usual.

Larry Lang is CEO of Quorum in San Jose, Calif.