new delhi coming out with fresh guidelines sebi on monday asked market infrastructure institutions to begin operations from disaster recovery sites within 45 minutes of a disruption to critical systems including tradingthe directive comes against the backdrop of a technical glitch at the national stock exchange nse on february 24 that halted trading for nearly four hoursin a circular sebi said that with advancement in technology and improved automation of processes it was felt that the extant framework needs to be reexamined with a view to reducing the time period specified for moving from primary data centre pdc to disaster recovery site drsthe watchdog has come out with a new framework for business continuity plan bcp and disaster recovery dr of market infrastructure institutions miis stock exchanges clearing corporations and depositoriesin the event of disruption of any one or more of the critical systems the mii would within 30 minutes of the incident declare that incident as disaster and take measures to restore operations including from drs within 45 minutes of the declaration of disaster sebi saidthe new guidelines should be implemented within 90 days the securities and exchange board of india saidcritical systems for an exchange or clearing corporation would include trading risk management collateral management clearing and settlement and index computation while critical systems for a depository shall include systems supporting settlement process and interdepository transfer systemmiis have to ensure that the recovery point objective rpo the maximum tolerable period for which data might be lost due to a major incident would be 15 minutessolution architecture of pdc and drs should ensure high availability fault tolerance no single point of failure zero data loss and data and transaction integrity sebi saidany updates made at the pdc should be reflected at drs ns near site immediately before end of day with head room flexibility without compromising any of the performance metrics sebi saidmiis would have to develop systems that do not require configuration changes at the end of trading members clearing members depository participants for switchover from the pdc to drsfurther miis would have to test such switchover functionality by conducting unannounced live trading from its drs for at least one day in every six months unannounced live trading from drs of miis need to be done at a short notice of 45 minutes sebi saidwith regards to dr drills sebi said such drills should be conducted on a quarterly basis in case of exchanges and clearing corporations these drills should be closer to real life scenario trading days with minimal notice to drs staff involvedduring the drills the staff based at pdc should not be involved in supporting operations in any manner the drill should include running all operations from drs for at least one full trading dayaccording to sebi live trading sessions from dr site need to be scheduled for at least two consecutive days in every six months such live trading sessions from the drs need to be organised on normal working daysthe