The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) on Monday directed market infrastructure institutions to switch operations to their disaster recovery site within 45 minutes of any disruption in trading.

This diktat comes in the wake of the technical glitch at the National Stock Exchange on February 24, which halted trading for nearly four hours.

In a circular, the market regulator said that with advancement in technology and improved automation of processes, it was felt that the extant framework needs to be re-examined to reducing the time period specified for moving from Primary Data Centre to Disaster Recovery Site. The watchdog has, therefore, come out with a new framework.

Sebi added that in the event of a disruption in any one or more of the ‘critical systems’, the institution would, within 30 minutes of the incident, declare it as ‘disaster’ and take measures to restore operations, including from disaster recovery site within 45 minutes of the declaration of the disaster. The new guidelines should be implemented within 90 days.

Critical systems for an exchange or clearing corporation would include trading, risk management, collateral management, clearing and settlement and index computation. For a depository this will include systems supporting settlement process and inter-depository transfer system.

Further, MIIs have been told 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 minutes. This means the exchanges will have to backup data every 15 minutes. This was 30 minutes earlier.