SEBI Proposes Four-Hour Disaster Recovery Drills for MIIs

SEBI proposes tighter tech resilience norms for MIIs

New Delhi, Sep 15

The regulator also proposed introducing strengthened operational resilience and data recovery requirements for stock exchanges.

Under the proposed framework, MIIs would conduct DR drills on a non-working day, and would involve initiating at the primary data centre (PDC) and switching over to the disaster recovery site (DRS). The overall drill would need to run for at least four hours, including the switchover time.

The erstwhile guidelines stipulated conducting DR drills for one full trading day and a scenario of intraday shifting from PDC to Disaster Recovery Site (DRS) during the mock trading sessions in order to demonstrate its preparedness to meet stipulated Recovery Time Objective (RTO) / Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

SEBI said the changes were proposed following representations from exchanges as conducting drills for the entire market session can be cumbersome for both market participants and MIIs.

As part of the switchover exercise in DR drill, institutions shall test various scenarios impacting their systems, depending on their architecture and line of business. Such a list of comprehensive scenarios should be reviewed by the Standing Committee on Technology (SCOT) of MIIs.

This would enhance preparedness of MIIs to handle disruptions in their systems during live operations.

The regulator also directed MIIs to conduct comprehensive stress testing or mock testing on various masters, table sizes, other non-transactional components etc. to assess system performance for scaled up activity level or load or database records.

"MIIs shall proactively identify, document and monitor all boundary conditions and upper limits (such as database, configuration, table size, counter limits etc.) to prevent exceptions in smooth operations before such limits are breached," the statement noted.

— IANS