Euronext Securities Porto has in place a process for constant maintenance of its Business Continuity Plan, according to the best international practices, in order to ensure that the strategy and the procedures defined within the plan are capable to address any foreseeable crisis situation allowing, thus, the good functioning of the Market.
On the 30th of October 2021, Euronext Securities Porto carried out a global external test of business continuity with the activation of its disaster recovery center, allowing financial intermediaries to verify Interbolsa’s recovery capacity, acting normally from their own offices. This test is part of the plan for the verification of the adequacy and of the operation of the recovery procedures and necessary resources as described in the Business Continuity Plan of Euronext Securities Porto.
Euronext Securities Porto took advantage of the availability of the T2S platform during a non-working day to test with external participation the activation of the Business Continuity Plan. This availability was made possible by ECB extending the real time settlement window after the NTS settlement on the night from Friday to Saturday until Saturday afternoon.
The test was open to the voluntary participation of all financial intermediaries affiliated to Euronext Securities Porto, and ten institutions participated in this test of the disaster recovery center by accessing from their own offices, namely Banco Comercial Português, S.A., Novo Banco, S.A., Novo Banco Açores, S.A., BEST – Banco Electrónico de Serviço Total, S.A, Banco Finantia, S.A., BNP Paribas Securities Services, S.A., Citibank International, PLC – Sucursal em Portugal, S.A., Caixa Geral de Depósitos, S.A., ABANCA Corporacion Bancária, S.A. – Sucursal em Portugal and Banco de Portugal (DMR).
The test began on Saturday morning with a simulated incident, which left its main data center unavailable, with the consequent activation of the disaster recovery center and the re-routing of the communications decided after a meeting of the Crisis Management Team, thus allowing all participants to access the recovery system.
Immediately after the activation of the disaster recovery center, the Support and Recovery Teams activated the applications in the disaster recovery site and proceeded with the verification of the existence of information that resulted from the previous processing, as well as the accessibility to the services. After this the services were made available to the participants that they carried out testing activities using their terminals in their offices. These activities consisted of queries and data entry operations as well as information upload and download using the file transfer functions and real time messages of the STD system.
During the tests no critical issues were identified that could jeopardize the functioning of Euronext Securities Porto’s backup systems in a real disaster situation. This asserts the adequacy of the Business Continuity Plan of Interbolsa, as well as, of the disaster recovery data center.
All the activities executed according to a predefined test plan, which was thoroughly carried out. The testing was concluded with success, which was recognized by all internal and external participants.