Business Continuity Plan

Any outage means lost business opportunities and revenue. Silgate has taken into consideration several planned and unplanned scenarios, while putting in place a Business Continuity Plan (BCP). The BCP has covered three levels of redundancy. This includes:

• IT and telecommunicationInfrastructure
• Operation floors
• Operation centers

An overview of the Disaster Response Life Cycle is shown below:

Our operation centers are coming up at Bangalore, Pune & Nasik  and each of them will act as reciprocal sites (warm sites). We recommend that processes be equally divided between other centers to provide business continuity.

The BCP is reviewed bi-annually and is based on a team concept methodology with recovery teams for each of our functions namely IT, logistics and operations.

Silgate has client-specific BCPs in place for every process.

The BCP is to be used as the basis for guiding recovery activities.

The plan assists in identifying:

• Systems, tasks and processes which are crucial to the operation of critical business functions, and define back-up procedures for business continuity.
• Personnel responsible for business continuity activities
• Levels of outage and responses to individual disruptions.
• Alternate processing locations and resources required to effectively function (such as, vital records, office furniture and equipment, data processing hardware and software, supplies, vendors, etc.).

Periodic Analysis

Silgate believes that an effective BCP requires periodic testing. We conduct internal and client audits in the following manner:

Tactical exercises: Training by way of walk-through scenarios of commonly occurring business outages is held from time-to-time. The Crisis Response Teams (CRTs) will have on-hand experience in the various steps to be executed in the event of an outage based on scenarios outlined in the BCP. These are held on a regular basis by our BCP team.

Table-top testing: Periodic testing of outage scenarios like server down-time, active devices failure, link outages etc. This is a brain-storming session between the members of the recovery team, where all possible scenarios are mapped out and solutions to tackle these outages are arrived at. This is conducted on a regular basis by our BCP team.

Live Test: Silgate conducts live tests with real down-times, taking into consideration possible scenarios. This is conducted along with the client project team, and the scenarios are finalized after mutual agreement. By way of example, we have conducted a live test where we assumed complete shut-down of an entire operation center. Such tests are conducted only with the permission of the client. This is conducted every six months.