What Happens When A Financial Institution Goes Down?

A smiling young woman takes a picture with her smart phone of a check or paycheck for digital electronic depositing, also known as "Remote Deposit Capture". She sits in a coffee shop, enjoying an espresso latte. Bright sunlight shines in the window.

Today’s world lives on the Internet. We expect most everything to be at our fingertips – whether it’s dinner reservations or online banking – we’re always on. Credit unions and banks, for example, rely on the loyalty of their members and customers for success. Those loyal patrons, in turn, depend on their services to be available 24 x 7 x 365. So, what happens when a service goes down?

The Three-Day Outage…

Canada’s largest credit union, Vancity, recently experienced a three-day service disruption. Customers were not able to access their online accounts, check balances, pay bills or complete electronic money transfers. Due to this substantial outage, the credit union is dealing with a backlog of banking needs, as well as thousands of angry customers, many of whom incurred late fees and other penalties when they couldn’t make online payments. Ouch! Not to mention, Vancity is also dealing with a PR nightmare and having to play clean-up to regain the trust of its members and their personal security.

Many financial institutions, or businesses in regulated industries, create resilient networks with multiple ISP connections and a load balancing failover device. This technology ensures a never down network and prevents outages due to communication link issues.

Protection at its Finest

PARDA Federal Credit Union, headquartered in Michigan, chose to upgrade the company network between its ten locations with secure SD-WAN technology. PARDA uses virtual desktops and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calling applications in its day-to-day operations, which were performing poorly on their MPLS network due to high latency. The new network configuration, using SD-WAN technology, solved the latency issue by providing automatic failover and proactive congestion prevention for its traffic.

“We’ve been pleased,” said Anthony Steffens, Chief Information Officer at PARDA. “Our network is always optimized with granular traffic shaping and prioritization. There are more features we plan to implement. Calls no longer drop and applications are always accessible for staff and members.”  

Ecessa system architects met with PARDA to create a solution that was appropriate for their business needs, then carefully deployed using a phased approach to guarantee its success.

To learn more about PARDA, and their approach to a Never Down™ network, download the complete case study here.

Download The Case Study

“Credit unions and banks can’t afford to risk an outage. They need to implement network redundancy and resilience now. I would recommend Ecessa to other credit unions because it works. It simply works.”Anthony Steffens.