Business Continuity Management
Clearstream’s Business Continuity Management (BCM) setup and measures address not only the unavailability of systems and suppliers, but also the loss of workspace and significant numbers of staff in order to ensure the continuity of the most critical operations even in cases of severe disruption scenarios.
Business Continuity Management (BCM) – a key mitigator for availability risk
Clearstream places the highest importance on the resilience of its business to safeguard it against incidents and disasters. As the unavailability of core processes and resources represents a substantial risk for Clearstream, and a potential systemic risk to the markets as a whole, Clearstream has implemented a comprehensive set of BCM solutions.
Our BCM solutions cover:
Systems unavailability
Several alternate connectivity options are available to clients to ensure the resilience of their connectivity to Clearstream systems. Data centres in the main operating locations are locally duplicated to form two active centres acting as backups of each other. These data centres are interconnected with high-speed optical data links, which are also duplicated. Data is written to multiple disks in real time across the two data centres.
Workspace unavailability
Dedicated work facilities provide backup office space for mission critical staff in the event an office location becomes unavailable. These backup facilities are fully-equipped and networked to the distributed data centres, and are operational at all times.
Staff unavailability
Business Continuity solutions also cover the significant unavailability of staff, for example during a pandemic based incident. Solutions are designed to make sure that the minimum staff and skills required are available outside the impacted area.
Supplier unavailability
Clearstream assures itself of the continuous provision of critical supplier services through a regular due diligence review of suppliers’ BCM arrangements, provision of services by alternative suppliers, if possible, and service level agreements describing the minimum service levels expected from suppliers and contingency procedure requirements.
Incident and crisis management process
Clearstream has implemented a group wide incident and crisis management process, which facilitates the coordinated response and rapid reaction to an incident or crisis in a controlled and effective manner. The process aims to minimise business and market impact, as well as enable the swift return to regular business activity.
“Real-life” simulation testing
Clearstream adopts a comprehensive and ambitious business continuity testing approach that simulates scenarios as close as possible to real life situations.