Business Continuity Plan (BCP) Coordinator Boot Camp - December 2nd & 3rd.
Improve your Business Continuity Plan by learning best practices for keeping plans viable and up-to-date!

Business Continuity Plan (BCP) Coordinator Boot Camp December 9th & 10th register now!

Join us for an educational discussion about what cloud computing is and how credit unions may be able to benefit from it.

Mid-Atlantic Corporate Has Selected Ongoing Operations for its Business Continuity Needs

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Ongoing Operations Introduces Enhanced Website

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Streaming Webinar Recording "Strategies for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning"

Mid-Atlantic Corporate Selects Ongoing Operations for Its Business Continuity Needs

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Ongoing Operations, LLC, the growing business continuity CUSO that has rapidly expanded to serve over 100 credit union clients nationwide, has chosen Walter Hoo to head operations in its growing Maryland Data Center.

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Ongoing Operations, LLC has become the newest National Association of Credit Union Service Organizations (NACUSO) Gold Partner to demonstrate its ongoing commitment to collaboration.

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Ongoing Operations Business Continuity Solutions Now Protect Over 4.6 million Members and 19% of Industry Assets

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Join Ongoing Operations, FSCC and PSCU as they host the 2010 Credit Union Retail Delivery Convention - June 30 - July 2, 2010, Renaissance Chicago Hotel-Chicago, Illinois

CO-OP Financial Services Joins Other Industry Leaders as an Investor in the Ongoing Operations CUSO

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Ongoing Operations Receives NACUSO's 2010 Collaboration & Innovation Award

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Ongoing Operations Receives NACUSO's 2010 Collaboration & Innovation Award

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View the slides from our recent Crisis Communications webinar event. Our Master Business Continuity Planner will discuss the importance of crisis communications, key areas to consider, and the latest automated systems that can help.

Ongoing Operations' Chief Technology Officer, Hugh Smallwood, gives advice for credit unions to the Credit Union Times...

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Ongoing Operations welcomed Sarah Canepa Bang of FSCC as one of three new Board members during its recent annual meeting in Chicago.

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Ongoing Operations welcomed Bruno Sementilli, CEO of Quorum FCU to its Board recently.

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Ongoing Operations recently welcomed Kari Wilfong of CO-OP Financial Services as one of three new Board members during their annual meeting in Chicago.

Read the full press release

Ongoing Operations Welcomed Sarah Canepa Bang of FSCC as one of three new Board members during its recent annual meeting in Chicago.

Read the full story

Download the slides from our recent benchmarking event where we discussed how credit unions of various asset sizes compare in terms of recovery objectives, in-house or vendor management of the plan and overall budget. We also encourage you to view the new White Paper that discusses the data in more detail.

September 17th, 2010 - Ongoing Operations, LLC,the growing business continuity CUSO that has rapidly expanded to serve over130 clients nationwide, recently welcomed Kyle Stutzman as its new Director ofLevel 1 and 2 Client Support and Infrastructure.

Hagerstown, MD - November 4, 2010 - Ongoing Operations, the leading business continuity CUSO, has acquired Teneros, the provider of a High Availability and Disaster Recovery solution for Microsoft Exchange to about 250 organizations, including credit unions. Read the full story.

Ongoing Operations, the leading business continuity CUSO, has partnered with Cloudworks, a proven provider of hosted applications, virtual desktop solutions and hosted exchange, to create a new suite of production grade IT offerings specifically for credit unions.

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The Evolution of Single Sign-On - By Kyle Stutzman, Director Implementations, Testing and Level 3 Support

Many of you have looked at or possibly implemented a Single Sign-on (SSO) solution.  You know the problem, we have many services or systems that have little or no interconnected authentication or identity system. This leaves your internal staff managing authentication for each of the individual services and your users trying to manage multiple user names,passwords, and secondary authentication for each system.  I think this problem continues to expand as we move more and more into cloud based solutions with services outside our network perimeter.  If you already have a SSO solution or are looking at one I suggest staying familiar with Federated Identity Management (FIM) standards. 

As cloud services become a larger part of our businesses making sure our SSO solution and cloud vendors work with these standards is important.  SAML and WS-Federation seem to be two primary standards that should be considered but there are also some newer developing standards to watch.  Finding the federation standard or standards that work for you and your vendors can lead to finding the right solution for internal and external identity management.

I’ve included a few links below that offer a basic FIM overview.

http://www.pingidentity.com/knowledge-center/SSO-and-Federated-Identity.cfm

http://www.authenticationworld.com/Authentication-Federation/

http://wiki.cloudsecurityalliance.org/guidance/index.php/Identity_and_Access_Management

Read the full story here.

Ongoing Operations has just released a new white paper, exploring how credit union IT departments will likely change as technology shifts toward the cloud. Download your copy.

Read the full release

Be sure to stop by the Ongoing Operations' exhibit if you are attending:

• CUNA's Technology Council Conference - September 2011

  • The best minds, best opportunities and best solutions willconverge when the CUNATechnology Council Conference and the CUNAOperations, Sales & Service Council Conference are co-located, September25-28 in San Antonio, TX! Connect witheven more of your peers, learn at a wider variety of sessions — over 40 areavailable between the two conferences — and emerge inspired with cutting-edgeideas, infinite opportunities and real-world actions to apply directly to yourcredit union.

By Kirk Drake, CEO

I often hear credit unions talk about achieving scale in their businesses.  Most credit union executives don’t believe their organization can ever achieve scale when compared to large organizations likes Bank of America or Citibank.  However, I often hear “well if 20 of us get together and do X, then we will have scale.”  This can be a dangerous fallacy – especially in technology.  In reality, I don’t believe credit unions can truly achieve scale alone or together in this area with small pockets of participation. Credit unions need to re-frame how they think about scale if they are going to be competitive long-term financial players in an increasingly technical world. 

First,I think it is important to redefine scale as it relates to our businesses. At Ongoing Operations, we look at achievement of scale as the point in time when a fundamental cost of doing business is essentially eliminated or no longer relevant.  For example, if today you sell cars and the tires area key cost, then the goal should be to eliminate or minimize that expense.  This could be achieved by replacing rubber with another material or buying a large enough quantity that the price per unit is no longer material.  Often, a huge component of total cost comes from mobilization and tear down.  Being able to avoid repeating those transaction costs can save significant dollars.  

Another example, that we have experienced firsthand, is that the shipping fee for heavy equipment is generally the same if you order 1 or 50 of the unit.  If you can place one bulk order for 50 (to the same location),you can save a substantial amount on shipping.   Essentially the problem is that even if you aggregate 20 credit unions’ spending in anyone area,you don’t eliminate the costs. Scale should not be viewed as a way to save 20% of the expense – instead it should be seen as a way to fundamentally reduce or make the expense immaterial.

So where can credit unions create true scale?  Here are a few examples that OGO has found. 

• ThinkBig (100+ credit unions as the tipping point): The Connector DR product allows OGO to share the costs of providing backup connectivity to all ATM/DEBIT/Credit switches among over 100 credit unions.  The costs for providing this for a group of 1-20 credit unions was larger than what a single credit union would pay on their own – but incremental costs beyond number 20 were minimal.  And after reaching the critical point of100, adding a new credit union became immaterial and significant value was generated back to the credit union owners.

• Collaborate to Meet Shared Requirements: Business Continuity Planning is another area where, by developing an efficient and well thought out methodology, Ongoing Operations was able to create true scale for our CUSO owners and clients. All credit unions share the same regulatory requirements and we were able to provide both the software and significant hands on assistance for credit unions to develop and run complete business continuity programs. A credit union creating and managing a plan internally is only affordable for $500 million and larger institutions – and even then can represent inefficiency and an opportunity cost vs. focusing staff resources on other member facing initiatives.

• Look outside the industry – We have also found that picking the key expense item and looking for ways to combine non-credit union business into the solution can provide scale.  For example, Ongoing Operations’ initial bandwidth costs were unprofitable and prohibited growth even if we combined 100 credit unions together.  However, we found a company that needed 100 times the bandwidth that all of our credit unions in aggregate needed.  By providing the service at cost to that client – we lowered our cost for credit unions’ bandwidth to a point where it was no longer unprofitable to provide the service.   The end scale reduced our communication cost by over a 100 point factor – a fundamental reduction.

Join us for a FREE workshop on June 1st at SAFE Credit Union to discuss industry best practices in business continuity. View a copy of the agenda here. Register below or feel free to contact us at info@ongoingoperations.com with any questions.

OGO announces new Middeltown, Virginia location. Read more

The Ongoing Operations CUSO recently celebrated its 5th anniversary and recognized the founding credit unions, organizations and leaders who were vital to its initial formation and have made contributions toward its continued success.

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Join us on November 18, 2011 in Richmond, VA. This interactive session will include expert speakers and opportunities to network with your peers on business continuity challenges and solutions.

View the agenda here for November 18th.

RSVP to attend the session or contact us to add your topics to the agenda.

Coming Soon! Look for more P3 events in early 2012 - including one hosted by Mid-Atlantic Corporate FCU in Pennsylvania.

Don't wait for a crisis to prepare your communication strategy and test your implementation tools! Download the powerpoint presentation from our recent webinar here.

View archived version here

The following key outcomes were covered by our Master Business Continuity Planner:
1. Review why having a Crisis Communications plan is important
2. What should be included in your plan
3. How to leverage new technologies to communicate more effectively
4. Gold Nuggets (lessons learned from actual crisis situations)
 

By Sharon Simpson, Marketing Consultant

I had some reservations about moving to a virtual desktop when OGO introduced them months ago. At first I got confused as to where I had saved documents - did I save that one in the cloud or on the actual computer? I found myself keeping multiple copies of items, but slowly migrated all the important stuff (files I actually use, minus all the dead weight) over. Recently - like within the past two weeks - I've heard several horror stories from other consultants who have had their "computer crash". Tales of losing everything, starting from scratch, finding back-ups too old to be useful or just not even working at all have been shared. And I realize, being virtual is pretty awesome! I can't tell you how many times I get disconnected from the internet at my home office - maybe it is because I live out in the middle of nowhere or maybe it is just bad luck. Either way, I am often saved by the virtual desktop with the way it automatically restores my session just where I was (with all my work still intact) and is accessible from Ipads or computers anywhere there is a working internet connection. I still do some work on my actual PC and even my super old Mac iBook, which I often fear might catch fire. But more and more I am turning to the cloud and embracing the new, virtual version of my desktop!

Jeff Goff, Vice President of Administration for HEW Federal Credit Union, was recently elected Chairman of Ongoing Operations' Board of Managers. Bruno Sementilli, CEO of Quorum Federal Credit Union, was elected Vice Chair; Jeff Arvai, CEO of Transportation Federal Credit Union was re-elected Secretary; and Sean Zimmermann, Vice President Operations & Technology of Tower Federal Credit Union was re-elected Treasurer. Read the full story

Read the full comment letter here.

View an archived version of the recent Benchmarking Your Business Continuity Plan webinar here.

Credit Union Magazine recently featured tips from Ongoing Operations professionals and clients in their article on Disaster Preparedness. Read the full article here.