NE BUSINESS BUREAU
AHMEDABAD, FEB 28
To allay the fears of investors following a technical glitch last week, the National Stock Exchange of India Ltd (NSE) stressed its commitment towards providing a robust, stable, and reliable platform and outlined its investments made towards the strengthening of the platform.
“NSE has a robust, resilient, secure, and fault-tolerant technology infrastructure supported by best-in-class equipment from vendors like Cisco, HP, Dell, Hitachi, Checkpoint, Palo Alto, Oracle, etc., aided by able technology service providers like TCS, Cognizant, Wipro, etc.,” it said.
Further, the bourse added that it has a strong technology governance process in place wherein the technology infrastructure is reviewed regularly by committees such as the standing committee on technology, which has technology experts. Also, multiple types of audits are carried out by various firms and institutions with specialised expertise, it said.
The NSE mentioned that it invests heavily in its technology infrastructure continuously and over the last 3-4 years, it has almost tripled its annual cash spend on capital and operational expenses on technology to around Rs 900 crore with a strong technology workforce of around more than 1,500 people, including employees and vendor staff.
Noting that it is the largest derivatives exchange in the world by volumes, it said that NSE has “demonstrated a track record of handling significantly high volumes despite a challenging external environment over the last one year due to the pandemic without any impact on trading”.
Stating that the exchange constantly endeavours to provide a glitch-free environment, it said that the complex technology architecture, however, has significant external and vendor dependencies in terms of connectivity and hardware.
It cited examples of similar outages in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Germany, and the UK, which occurred in the past two years.
It said that post the shutdown of trading on NSE, the exchange considered all the “available alternatives on hand, including the invocation of disaster recover site to decide on the course of action that would bring up the market at the earliest with least disruption to market participants and post evaluation, a decision was taken to bring up the systems at the primary site”.
The statement further clarified that it takes steps for disaster recovery readiness in line with SEBI regulations wherein quarterly drills are conducted and live trading sessions from the site are conducted twice a year.
It reiterated that it is awaiting detailed root cause analysis from its vendors regarding Wednesday’s incident.
