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As part of its regular BCP procedures, Qatar Stock Exchange, brokers and business partners successfully conducted an industry-wide BCP exercise at QSE premises. The proposed scenario involved a major disaster striking QSE premises and primary data centre during the pre-opening phase of the trading session. During the simulated outage, QSE moved all critical IT and business operations to the secondary DR and BCP operations site while all brokers and business partners shifted their connectivity to the same, allowing for the resumption of a safe and orderly trading session. At the end of the BCP test, post-trading procedures were securely undertaken and connectivity moved back to the primary site, thereby ensuring the normal resumption of trading on the next day following the exercise.
Commenting on the occasion, QSE CEO, Rashid Al-Mansoori stated: "We are delighted at the positive outcome of this BCP test and we want to thank all brokers, business partners, and the participating QSE staff for this success as well as the QFMA for their supervision of the event. It is a clear indication of our willingness to ensure business continuity in case of major BCP events for the benefit of the local and international investor community. Nevertheless, we will not rest on these laurels and we are actively working on new initiatives to reduce the fail-over timespan and these will be tested during the next BCP event"
A business continuity plan is a plan to continue operations if a place of business is affected by adverse physical conditions, such as a storm, fire or crime. Such a plan typically explains how the business would recover its operations or move operations to another location. For example, if a fire destroys an office building or data center, the people and business or data centre operations would relocate to a recovery site.
The importance of Business Continuity Planning is something that all important organizations have in place to address the occurrence of various risks. The ability of an organization to swiftly recover from a disaster is directly related to the degree of BCP that has taken place before the disaster.
Business Continuity Plans are critical to the transparent and continuous operation of all types of businesses. More importantly, these strategies are taking greater importance as companies become increasingly reliant on technology to do business. As companies place more emphasis on IT and communications services - to support their customer communications and transactions, or to help manage supply chains - they become less tolerant to information and service loss as a consequence of disasters.
