BSE and Noventiq Build a Scalable, Secure Investor Risk Reduction Access Solution on AWS

Founded in 1875, BSE (formerly the Bombay Stock Exchange) is Asia’s oldest stock exchange, providing a transparent market for trading in equities, currencies, debt instruments, derivatives, and mutual funds. In 2023, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) introduced the Investor Risk Reduction Access (IRRA) guidelines, mandating stock exchanges to jointly offer a contingency service to address disruptions caused by technical issues or unforeseen outages at the broker's end. This service helps investors cancel pending orders or square off outstanding positions through a unified platform shared by all Indian exchanges in the event of a stockbroker outage.

BSE’s step-down subsidiary, BSE Technologies Private Ltd. (BTPL), was tasked with developing and implementing the IRRA platform. The platform required seamless connectivity with all Indian exchanges, compliance with SEBI’s stringent security requirements, and 24x7 threat monitoring. “We needed to create a reliable business continuity platform to provide trading services when stockbrokers’ trading applications weren’t operational,” says Avinash Shelar, general manager at BTPL.

After evaluating various cloud providers, BTPL chose AWS to develop and deploy the IRRA platform, using AWS Organizations and AWS Control Tower as the foundation for centralized governance and security controls. The infrastructure is deployed and managed using AWS CloudFormation, with AWS Lambda for event-based triggers.  To meet SEBI’s rigorous security standards, BSE partnered with Noventiq to enhance the IRRA solution with robust security features, including 24x7 threat monitoring, rapid incident response, and preventive measures against potential attacks, ensuring a secure trading environment for investors.

“Because connectivity has to be instantaneous for stockbrokers, we built a solution to receive real-time data feeds from five Indian stock exchanges, plus their disaster recovery environment using dedicated network connectivity,” says Kunal Kalra, presales lead cloud security at Noventiq. Using AWS Direct Connect and AWS Transit Gateway, the platform ensures seamless reception of multicast feeds from primary and disaster recovery (DR) exchanges, along with reliable connectivity for robust data transmission. Additionally, AWS Auto Scaling provides on-demand scalability to handle fluctuating workloads efficiently.

The solution incorporates robust security measures, including security information and event management (SIEM) and privileged access management (PAM). Noventiq implemented 24x7 incident monitoring and response, continuous posture assessment with auto-remediation for non-compliance, access management mechanisms, and strong encryption for data in motion and at rest. Managed services ensure cost optimization and operational efficiency. The SEBI-compliant IRRA platform, launched in November 2023, provides centralized access to all Indian exchanges through a unified framework.

With its IRRA solution on AWS, BSE fully complies with SEBI's mandate, ensuring reliable business continuity to manage disruptions for broker trading systems across India. “Stockbroker trading applications are business-critical, and we ensure uninterrupted trading in the event of an outage due to the solution we built on AWS,” says Shelar. Thanks to the new solution, BSE can have IRRA application servers operational within 15 minutes of a system shutdown, including starting virtual servers and transitioning tasks to the BTPL operations team. “When a brokerage system goes down, we need to restart it as quickly as possible,” Shelar explains. “Using AWS, we can efficiently manage the entire process.”

Additionally, the exchange anticipates lower operating costs due to AWS’s elasticity. “This is much more cost-effective than installing this application on-premises and managing the servers and licenses,” Shelar notes. The platform’s dynamic scalability means BSE can support 5,000 connections per virtual server—a number expected to grow as stock exchange transactions increase. “With AWS Auto Scaling, we can easily expand the number of CPUs and memory to handle any rise in transactions,” Shelar concludes. “This solution will help us seamlessly meet our clients’ needs in the future.”