Business Continuity

Experience has taught us that it is not a question of “If” an infrastructure failure will happen; but, “When” will it happen.  The key is to minimize impact.  Our team of SAN and NAS Experts that specialize in EMC devices will work with your team to setup automated Snaps or mirrors of your business critical data at key points during the day as a recovery point should a disaster strike. Typical recovery points include:

• Start of business day.


• Noon.


• Just prior to market close.


• Receipt and posting of prices prior to nightly batch cycles.


• Immediately after batch cycle completes.


• The following of dividend and fee processing or other significant post batch activity.

Disaster Recovery & Daily Backups

In conjunction with business continuity our team will work with your operations group to understand your business critical need and recovery SLAs to help you devise a Disaster Recovery Plan or review your existing plan for possible gaps.  If gaps are found, we will then offer our suggestion of considerations to improve your DR capabilities along with DR backup schedules.  We will work with your team to design, implement and operate a backup schedule that will satisfy both DR and daily operational needs.

Threshold Predictive Support

We will analyze your current base line of infrastructure and processing capabilities.  Within the baseline, we consider both your internal and external interfaces and how they impact both your client and non-client facing applications.  We then compare your baseline of operations to your infrastructure capacity to determine your remaining capacity.  Assuming you have remaining capacity that does not exceed reasonable thresholds, we can set up monitoring operations to know when thresholds are reached.  This process allows plenty of time to make appropriate adjustments to avoid a failure.

Event / Cycle Monitoring

No matter if your organization utilizes a managed service for your Record Keeping System like TRAC2000 or a very customized hosted system like OmniPlus run by your own teams, you still have processing cycles within the daily operations that are based on various events.   Events can range from receipt of files like a daily price feed to trigger the nightly batch process or a nightly equity dividend file to trigger equity processing.  Events may include receipt of other files that can be variable. For example, Morning Star Feeds for an advice product that you offer or daily balance feeds from brokerages for SDBO options that some plans may have.  The events can include the receipt and processing of payroll files within certain SLAs to guarantee certain posting timelines or the load of a downstream ODS that is used by ancillary interfaces for client facing applications.  We excel in event monitoring, notification and problem resolution to ensure smooth operations within client’s environments.

Monitoring:

Our Monitoring team is composed of industry veterans with experience in using several tools.  We offer 24/7 monitoring and can even coordinate with our engineers to solve basic issues before alerting or waking up the on call developer or manager.   We will have weekly meeting with IT managers to review any production updates, new product installs or any exception processing that could impact the normal day to day processing.  Our operators have experience dealign with NSCC, Mutual fund families, Clearing Partners, Banks to resolve any technical issues.   The quality and reliability of our Monitoring team is second to none in the industry. We offer two types of Monitoring:

• System Monitoring: We fully monitor the health of your hardware, application servers, database servers, network and databases.  We have proprietary monitoring tools both off the shelf and open source that we can help implement or use the ones that is already in place.
• Process Monitoring: This involves monitoring all business processes including payroll processing, daily batch processing of trades, nightly trading and files transmissions.  Our team has experience in most monitoring and scheduling tools in the market and can document the processes if it doesn’t exist.