FMA

FMA provides a flexible, reliable platform for building disaster-tolerant SWIFT Alliance Access computing environments, by real time asynchronous mirroring SWIFT transactions and routing rules between two remote sites.

The backup centre is usually located in a different geographical place than the primary site (especially if this is located in an area historically exposed to natural, utilities or security hazards). Our recommendation is that important market players should build more resilience through redundant-functional backup centers, located in significantly distant areas. The platform (hardware, software and communications subsystem) of the Hot Backup Centers should be identical to the ones in the primary site.

FMA sends in real time the transactions from the primary platform to the back-up platform. The communication cost is effective while the bandwidth requirements are not that demanding, since FMA sends single transactions rather than database replicas.

Besides the basic transaction mirroring engine, FMA offers:

- a business and technical monitoring subsystem

- a procedure and event management subsystem providing:

o working procedures management (create, update & disseminate)

o BC&DR (business continuity and disaster recovery) support

o planned events support

- BCP (business continuity plan) virtual rehearsal & update support, saving important related costs and time

- eLearning support

In case of an unexpected event, the backup platform is immediately available and ready to run (transmit & receive the financial transactions) and the staff activities are guided - avoiding an important amount of human errors (more likely to occur in stressful situations).

This strategy makes the payment system resilient: it might bend but it doesn't break and recovers quickly to the initial shape.