Guidelines for Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) of Market Infrastructure Institutions (MIIs)

SEBI/HO/MRD/DMS1/CIR/P/2019/43 · 2019-03-26 · SEBI

Summary

This circular establishes a modified framework for Business Continuity Plans (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) applicable to Market Infrastructure Institutions including stock exchanges, depositories, and clearing corporations. It mandates specific technical configurations for Primary Data Centres, Near Sites, and Disaster Recovery Sites to ensure zero data loss and high availability. The document outlines strict requirements for recovery time objectives, regular testing drills, policy documentation, and submission timelines to SEBI.

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The modified framework for BCP and DR shall be as under: a. The stock exchanges, clearing corporations and depositories (collectively referred as Market Infrastructure Institutions – MIIs) should have in place BCP and DRS so as to maintain data and transaction integrity. b. Apart from DRS, stock exchanges and clearing corporations should also have a Near Site (NS) to ensure zero data loss whereas, the depositories should also ensure zero data loss by adopting a suitable mechanism. c. The DRS should preferably be set up in different seismic zones and in case due to certain reasons such as operational constraints, change of seismic zones, etc., minimum distance of 500 kilometer shall be ensured between PDC and DRS so that both DRS and PDC are not affected by the same disaster. d. The manpower deployed at DRS /NS should have same expertise as available at PDC in terms of knowledge/ awareness of various technological and procedural systems and processes relating to all operations such that DRS /NS can function at short notice, independently. MIIs should have sufficient number of trained staff at their DRS so as to have the capability of running live operations from DRS without involving staff of the primary site.

Hardware, system software, application environment, network and security devices and associated application environments of DRS / NS and PDC shall have one to one correspondence between them.

MIIs should endeavor to develop systems that do not require configuration changes at the end of trading members/ clearing members/ depository participants for switchover from the PDC to DRS. Further, MIIs should test such switchover functionality by conducting unannounced 2 day live trading session from its DRS.

MIIs shall have Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of not more than 4 hours and 30 minutes, respectively.

The time taken to define/ establish/ declare a disaster should not be more than 2 hours and the total RTO including the time taken to declare an incident as disaster should not be more than 4 hours. Further, RTO shall be calculated from the occurrence of disaster and not from the time an incident is declared a disaster.

Solution architecture of PDC and DRS / NS should ensure high availability, fault tolerance, no single point of failure, zero data loss, and data and transaction integrity.

Any updates made at the PDC should be reflected at DRS/ NS immediately (before end of day) with head room flexibility without compromising any of the performance metrics.

Replication between PDC and NS should be synchronous to ensure zero data loss whereas, the one between PDC and DRS and between NS and DRS may be asynchronous.

DR drills should be conducted on a quarterly basis. In case of exchanges and clearing corporations, these drills should be closer to real life scenario (trading days) with minimal notice to DR staff involved.

During the drills, the staff based at PDC should not be involved in supporting operations in any manner.

The drill should include running all operations from DRS for at least 1 full trading day.

The results and observations of these drills should be documented and placed before the Governing Board of stock exchanges /clearing corporations/ depositories. Subsequently, the same along with the comments of the Governing Board should be forwarded to SEBI within a month of the DR drill.

Source: SecMarx — Guidelines for Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) of Market Infrastructure Institutions (MIIs). Verbatim text is public record; SecMarx structuring (linkage to applying orders) is cited to us.