settlement by the end of the day of the disruption, even in case of extreme circumstances. The FMI should regularly test these arrangements.
APEX Clear has various business continuity plans to manage physical, technological and financial events that can disrupt its business operations, including wide scale or major disruptive events. Existing plans include IT incident management and response plans, disaster recovery procedures, default management plans. IT plans include ensuring that data is synchronized through maintaining hot-hot backup and recovery between the primary and secondary data centres. APEX Clear has also established a Default Management Plan to manage financial disruptions such as a Clearing Member default situation. This will ensure that it is able to continue to perform its role as a central counterparty and fulfil its obligations in the event of a member default. APEX Clear also has in place other specific response plans for physical disruption scenarios such as pandemic, terrorist attacks to add to its portfolio of response plans. In the worst case scenario, APEX Clear’s crisis management plan will set out the procedures for responding to emergency crisis situations including stakeholder notification and crisis communications. APEX Clear’s portfolio of response plans will be subjected to annual review and regular testing. APEX Clear will also organise and participate in industry wide exercises with its Clearing Members. APEX Group has two Data Centres (“DC”), which are certified as Tier 3 and above and managed by two different vendors locally, with stringent access controls, real-time DC environment monitoring, redundant power supply and telecommunication facilities. The core applications of APEX and APEX Clear, including Trading System, Clearing System, Surveillance System and SWIFT Alliance Lite2 are all well designed systems with no single- point-of-failure nodes, which are also redundantly deployed at both primary and DR sites and run in hot-hot mode to achieve high availability at system level. Meanwhile, data at primary DC are replicated to DR site on a real-time basis. When primary data centre is disrupted, Disaster Recovery data centre can take over almost immediately from IT infrastructure perspective. Disaster Recovery Plan is developed, reviewed and tested on a regular basis. Roles and responsibilities, master recovery task list, and relevant escalation and decision-making procedures are documented in the disaster recovery plan. Recovery Time Objective and Recover Point Objective of the core systems are defined and validated on an annual basis, as set out in the Disaster Recovery Plan. APEX organizes industry-wide disaster recovery exercise on a regular basis, which includes various scenarios like system disruption, component failure, power supply failure, etc. External market participants are involved in the disaster recovery exercise to ensure the services will be recovered quickly in case of disruptions.
17.7	An FMI should identify, monitor, and manage the risks that key participants, other FMIs, and service and utility providers might pose to its operations. In addition, an FMI should identify, monitor, and manage the risks its operations might pose to other FMIs.
As covered in key consideration 17.6, APEX Clear has in place various response plans to manage and mitigate the risks of disruptive events. In addition, APEX Clear has also established various controls and policies to manage its risks arising from other participants, FMIs, and service and utility providers. The Member Supervision team monitors its members and has the authority to conduct onsite visits and inspections on its Clearing Members to assess the adequacy of their risk management systems and internal controls. APEX Clear’s