The Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) will outsource the proposed Disaster Recovery Centre for business continuity of important services of the Commission, official sources told Business Recorder.
The executive director (IS&T) briefed the Commission in its previous meeting about the importance of setting up business continuity project as per internationally defined standards.
During the process, first key business and technical stakeholders were identified and a business continuity-working group was formed whose objectives and constraints were defined, but a strategic milestone was established and a roadmap was drawn.
At the second phase, business threats were identified and risk analysis had been conducted in which the IS&T department identified community of business and technical stakeholders, conducted threat identification workshops, the sources added.
The Commission made efforts to asses likelihood and impact of threat occurrence, categorised and prioritised threats according to risk level, reviewed outputs of risk analysis. Finally, a comprehensive and detailed RFP was prepared and it was decided that two different options would be considered for the establishment of disaster recovery continuity, one of which included to have Commission's own plan.
Sources said, the Commission also discussed site location with the meteorological departments and studied international surveys, which predict expected disasters.
A second option was to completely outsource the Disaster Recovery Centre, according to which all services and resources would be acquired from a company having its own established data centre of international standard.
Sources also said the Commission has now decided to evaluate a completely outsourced model in which the service-provider uses its own hardware, software, and network resources to link with the primary site and provide the business continuity service whenever the primary site becomes unavailable due to some reasons.