FNB ready for disaster

FNB Namibia conducted its annual live disaster recovery test over the past weekend which was aimed at running the Mainframe of a full business day from the disaster recovery site in Prosperita.
Stephen van Rhyn, head of IT at FNB Namibia, stated that the bank had achieved its objective, although there were a few challenges.
“Challenges included, for example, cross dependencies of files that took much longer to complete than usual which held up the batch completion for Namibia and subsequently the starting time of going into disaster recovery was postponed,” he said.
FNB Namibia also learned from the exercise that the process to move ATMs into disaster recovery mode is not easy and more effort has to be made to understand the process in more detail.
“This will be addressed as a number one priority,’ said van Rhyn.
No problems were experienced regarding Points of Sale, branches, credit cards, online banking and other areas.
FNB conducts these tests to streamline and test their readiness should a disaster occur in its production environment.