With hurricane season well underway, having a disaster preparedness plan in place is paramount. Not only do you need to worry about your employees’ and community members’ health and safety, you also must ensure your account holders have continuous access to banking services. In situations where your customers and members may need to evacuate or shelter in place, they will rely more than ever on your digital banking services. It begs the question, how prepared is your digital banking provider to support you when storms strike?
A digital banking solution hosted in a public cloud environment such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) is likely to experience significantly higher availability than one maintained in a vendor’s private data center environment. This is because a cloud-based solution has access to a large network of servers that can protect against failure should a storm occur, while a private data center is limited to the hardware dedicated to a single organization.
Redundancy is the key here. Your digital banking solution should operate in multiple regions, and in multiple data centers within each, ensuring that if servers go down in one data center — or even an entire region — they can be automatically relaunched in another in a disaster scenario.
The biggest variable in a true disaster situation may be whether your digital banking provider has an active and tested disaster recovery plan to ensure your account holders have uninterrupted access to their finances. For example, in early August 2022, Apiture successfully completed a full disaster recovery failover test of its code to another AWS region for a full week. Because we intentionally incorporate redundancy across multiple regions, we are confident in our ability to provide our clients with uninterrupted service when hurricanes or other disasters occur.
Downtime has a significant impact on your users, and efforts to mitigate it should be a top consideration for your digital banking provider. To find out best practices for performance and the factors you should consider when evaluating a digital banking provider, read our white paper, Beyond Features and Functionality: Five Questions to Ask When Evaluating Digital Banking Solutions.