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RETAIL e-FX PROVIDER<br />
Taking steps to prepare<br />
for Disaster Recovery<br />
By Eric Burgener, Senior VP of Marketing InMage<br />
In today’s climate, most enterprises maintain some<br />
form of business continuity plan. Business continuity<br />
plans provide a way for an enterprise to continue<br />
functioning in the event of a catastrophic disaster that<br />
shuts down business operations at one or more<br />
primary locations. Business continuity plans<br />
cover information technology (IT)<br />
infrastructure recovery, human capital<br />
issues that arise when business<br />
operations must be restarted at<br />
a remote location, and physical<br />
infrastructure issues, such as<br />
re-establishing <strong>com</strong>munications,<br />
ensuring physical security, and<br />
providing appropriate work areas at<br />
remote locations. IT infrastructure<br />
recovery, sometimes referred to as<br />
disaster recovery (DR), addresses the issues<br />
involved with recovering <strong>com</strong>puting<br />
equipment (servers, storage, etc.), data, and<br />
application services. DR provides a necessary<br />
foundation for business continuity plans but is not<br />
a substitute for them. An effective DR plan is<br />
especially important for online foreign exchange (FX)<br />
brokers, whose trade servers are absolutely essential<br />
to their businesses.<br />
Any downtime events, such as a server failure, virus or<br />
natural disaster, significantly affects a broker’s ability<br />
to <strong>com</strong>plete transactions, generate revenue and service<br />
its customers. FX brokers also operate in an<br />
increasingly strict regulatory environment. The National<br />
Futures Association (NFA) requires all members to<br />
adopt a disaster recovery (DR) plan reasonably<br />
designed to enable them to continue operating, reestablish<br />
operations, or transfer their business to other<br />
members with minimal disruption to their customers,<br />
other members, and the <strong>com</strong>modity futures markets.<br />
Additionally, all downtime events must be reported.<br />
This article will focus on the key elements of creating<br />
an effective DR plan, and then provide a short case<br />
study of how a leading provider of foreign exchange<br />
trading services, Interbank FX, implemented an<br />
updated DR plan to meet their requirements.<br />
112 | january 2010 e-FOREX
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