Nasdaq tests everyone's disaster recovery plans

CIO - Three years ago on Sept. 11, Kamran Rafieyan and his co-workers walked down 83 floors of World Trade Center Tower One to safety. "Miraculously enough, we didn't lose any people," says Rafieyan, CIO of Lava Trading Inc. His then-fledgling company, a service bureau that routes equity orders for brokers, lost its data center when the tower collapsed. "We were in the midst of building our backup site, and we had to scramble for four weeks to get it up and running."
Today, Lava Trading counts among its clients 16 of the top 20 investment banks and helps to process 15% of the daily trading volume on Nasdaq -- which is why on two Saturdays earlier this year, Rafieyan joined 49 other brokers and service providers in Nasdaq-sponsored disaster recovery tests. It was the first time that Lava Trading was able to test its disaster plans in an everyday business setting, rather than in a simulated environment.
In the first test, Nasdaq had customers test connectivity from their backup sites to Nasdaq's primary site in Connecticut; in the second, customers tested how either their primary or backup trading systems connected to Nasdaq's backup site in Maryland. Steve Randich, Nasdaq's executive vice president and CIO, reports nary a technical hiccup in the entire proceedings.
The tests were the first Nasdaq offered to its entire customer base. (In the past, Nasdaq has accommodated individual requests for testing whenever Nasdaq conducted its own.) With 9/11 and the August 2003 Northeast blackout behind them, it's becoming clear to many financial services companies that their survival depends on that of their trading partners. Regulators, meanwhile, are pushing securities traders to have proven disaster recovery plans in place. In April, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved a rule issued by Nasdaq's parent company, the National Association of Securities Dealers, requiring market participants to develop and disclose to its customers such plans by September 2004.
Randich says his goal was "to be a host" and to allow customers to confirm their ability to fail-over to their backup systems.The key benefit, he adds, "is to promote the resilience of the market in terms of investor protection. If there were to be a major event, we can go to bed knowing it's not troublesome to restore operations in the morning."
During the tests, participants worked individually with Nasdaq. Each company was asked to test whether it could submit orders, update quotes, submit and receive trade execution reports, and scan the system for executed and unexecuted orders. A few companies also