California Credit Union enhances disaster recovery and backup of Fiserv DNA core banking system on AWS

California Credit Union, founded in 1933 and headquartered in Glendale, is a member-owned, not-for-profit financial institution serving educators, school employees, and their families in Los Angeles and San Diego counties. With over $5 billion in assets and more than 200,000 members as of 2024, the credit union offers a comprehensive range of financial products and services, including checking and savings accounts, loans, credit cards, mortgages, and investment options.

As a community-focused organization, California Credit Union prioritizes personalized service, competitive rates, and financial education for its members. The institution has multiple branches throughout Southern California and provides modern online and mobile banking services to meet the evolving needs of its diverse membership. Committed to its founding principles, California Credit Union continues to adapt and grow while maintaining its dedication to the financial well-being of the communities it serves.

California Credit Union successfully used Amazon Web Service (AWS) to enhance its disaster recovery and backup capabilities for its core banking system, Fiserv DNA. This post explores how the credit union overcame challenges, improved its resilience, and set the stage for future innovations in financial services.

Challenge

California Credit Union faced limitations with its existing disaster recovery site in Scottsdale, Arizona. The colocation facility couldn’t scale to meet growing needs, and it wasn’t suitable as a comprehensive fallback solution. The credit union needed a more flexible, scalable solution that could support multi-Region operations and potentially enable active-active configurations for some systems.

Solution

California Credit Union chose to implement AWS services for second-level backup of their Fiserv DNA core banking system. This solution involved migrating from VMware to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for compute resources, using Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for high-performance local storage, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for backup storage, and replacing traditional file shares with Nasuni for network drives. The credit union currently runs a test instance of Fiserv DNA on AWS, dispelling doubts from external IT consultants about the feasibility of this approach.

The implementation process involved migrating around 15 different servers associated with the DNA test environment to AWS, including systems that interface with various vendors such as Visa. The credit union conducted a disaster recovery test of their production Fiserv DNA database and supporting servers by failing them over to AWS in November. During the migration, they replaced some Windows Servers and switched from traditional network drives to Nasuni. Notably, the integration with AWS services presented no significant challenges, contrary to initial expectations. The credit union was able to meet or exceed their Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) for the disaster recovery test.

Results and benefits

The move to AWS provided California Credit Union with improved scalability, overcoming the limitations of their physical colocation facility. The multi-Region capability of AWS will allow for a more robust disaster recovery strategy. Importantly, the credit union found that DNA’s Oracle database performance was not limited by AWS, with over 32,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) available when needed. The AWS environment also allowed California Credit Union to run extended testing periods, with plans to potentially run on AWS for a week in the coming year as part of disaster recovery testing.

Lessons learned and future plans

California Credit Union’s experience offers valuable insights for other financial institutions considering similar moves. The credit union successfully implemented their solution on AWS, demonstrating the importance of platform-agnostic thinking. Their approach of first implementing backup and disaster recovery, then considering more extensive use of AWS, provides a model for gradual transition. Ensuring that batch jobs ran at the same or better pace in the AWS environment as in the on-premises system was crucial for validating the solution.

Looking ahead, California Credit Union is exploring several enhancements to their AWS implementation. The credit union also plans to implement active-active configurations for systems that support it and extend the duration of AWS based operations during failover tests.

The following diagram shows the architecture that California Credit Union is working on implementing as part of their larger strategy of running DNA and other banking systems on AWS:

Conclusion

California Credit Union’s successful implementation of AWS for backup and disaster recovery of their core banking system demonstrates the potential for credit unions to use cloud technologies. By overcoming initial doubts and methodically expanding their use of AWS services, they’ve enhanced their operational resilience and set the stage for future innovations in serving their members. Their journey provides a valuable roadmap for other financial institutions looking to modernize their infrastructure and improve their disaster recovery capabilities. AWS is invested in supporting our credit union customers, demonstrated through our cloud-based credit union solutions.