One Of India's Largest Retail Stock Broking Firms.
The Firm Serves Millions Of Retail Investors Through Trading Applications, Mobile Platforms And Back-Office Settlement Systems. Market Hours Leave No Maintenance Window, And Even Brief Unavailability During Active Trading Carries Immediate Financial And Regulatory Consequence.
Recovery Arrangements Had Been Documented During An Earlier Audit And Never Revisited. Backups Ran Nightly, Replication Existed For Some Systems, And Nobody Could State With Confidence How Long Restoring Trading Services Would Actually Take Under Real Conditions.
Problem Statement
Despite Documented Arrangements, The Firm Struggled With:
- 01
Undefined Recovery Targets
No Application Carried An Agreed Recovery Time Or Data Loss Tolerance.
- 02
Unverified Backups
Backup Jobs Reported Success Without Any Restore Ever Being Attempted.
- 03
Untested Failover
Replication Existed For Some Systems But Had Never Been Exercised End To End.
Proposed Solution
The Engagement Built A Continuity Programme Around:
- Conducted A Business Impact Analysis Assigning Recovery Targets To Every Application Tier.
- Designed Replication And Backup Architecture Matched To Each Tier's Agreed Recovery Objectives.
- Established An Isolated Recovery Environment Protected From Changes Made In Production.
- Implemented Immutable Backup Copies Retained Beyond The Reach Of Administrative Credentials.
- Built Runbooks With Named Owners Covering Declaration, Failover, Validation And Return To Normal.
- Introduced A Drill Calendar Testing Full And Partial Recovery Scenarios Every Quarter.
Recovery Objectives That Have Actually Been Measured
Each Application Now Carries A Recovery Target Agreed With The Business Rather Than Assumed By IT. Quarterly Drills Measure Actual Recovery Against Those Targets, And Gaps Become Engineering Work Rather Than Audit Observations.
Tiered Recovery Targets Direct Investment Toward Trading Systems Rather Than Spreading It Evenly Across Everything.
Immutable Backup Copies Survive Credential Compromise, Keeping Recovery Possible When Production Copies Cannot Be Trusted.
Named Runbook Owners Remove Hesitation About Who Declares An Incident And Who Executes Each Step.
Quarterly Drills Convert Recovery Capability From A Documented Claim Into A Measured, Repeatable Result.
Result :
Recovery Time The Business Can Rely On
The Firm Now States Recovery Times For Each System Based On Measured Drill Results Rather Than Design Assumptions. Restore Integrity Is Verified On A Schedule, And Regulatory Reporting Draws On Evidence From Completed Exercises.
Minute Trading System RTO
Drills Completed Yearly
Restores Verified
Data Loss On Tier One
Lessons Learned
The Engagement Highlighted Three Lasting Takeaways:
-
A Backup Is Not A Restore
Jobs Reported Success For Years Without One Verified Recovery.
-
Tier Before Investing
Not Every System Needs Trading Platform Recovery, And Paying For It Wastes Budget.
-
Drills Find What Documents Hide
Every Exercise Surfaced Dependencies No Runbook Had Recorded.
TECHNOLOGIES - TOOLS USED
Recovery Runs On Replication And Backup Tooling Tiered By Application Criticality, With Immutable Copies Held Separately From Production Credentials. Orchestration Executes Documented Runbooks During Drills And Real Events, While Reporting Records Measured Recovery Times Against Agreed Objectives For Each System.
- Storage Replication
- Backup & Recovery
- Immutable Backup Copies
- Isolated Recovery Environment
- DR Orchestration
- Runbook Automation
- Business Impact Analysis
- Recovery Testing Tools
- Monitoring & Alerting
- Compliance Reporting
- Recovery Dashboards
CONCLUSION
Continuity Documents Reassure Auditors; Drills Reassure The Business. Assigning Measured Recovery Targets, Protecting Backups From Credential Compromise And Exercising Recovery Every Quarter Replaced A Set Of Assumptions With Something The Firm Can State Confidently To Regulators, Clients And Its Own Board.
