Guidelines for Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR)

Business continuity and disaster recovery required for exchanges and depositories, including strict recovery objectives and mandatory regular drills.

Stock exchanges and depositories must implement BCP and DR arrangements including a geographically separate Disaster Recovery Site and, for exchanges, a Near Site to achieve zero data loss; DRS/NS must mirror the Primary Data Centre in hardware, software, network and security, ensure high availability and no single point of failure, meet specified recovery objectives, use synchronous replication between PDC and NS, and maintain adequately trained personnel. Quarterly DR drills simulating live operations, documented results reviewed by the Governing Board and included in the annual system audit are mandatory, and a Board approved BCP DR policy must be submitted to the regulator within three months.