Business Continuity Management

Piper Jaffray has an ongoing and comprehensive business continuity management program in place intended to help us respond to and recover from a business disruption. The business continuity management program coordinates all our business disruption preparation efforts, including impact identification and analysis, business continuity plan development and testing, crisis management and training.

Piper Jaffray business continuity plan
We developed the business continuity plan to protect the interests of our clients, shareholders and employees, and to support the recovery of our core businesses. The company has documented continuity plans that identify core functions and the resources required to conduct them. Plans account for the following general scenarios:

  • Significant technology outage at a facility
  • Denial of access to a facility
  • Localized disaster

Our responses to each of these scenarios will depend on the external variables associated with the disruption (the time of day and the extent of the disruption, for example), but may include transferring functions to alternate sites or activation of and relocation to our proprietary recovery sites. On a best-effort basis, our goal is to begin resuming activities at the recovery site within eight hours of activating our business continuity plan.

Back-up facilities and arrangements
Piper Jaffray has taken a series of steps to ensure that adequate redundancy is in place to provide business stability during a disruption. We have focused on key technology infrastructure as well as arrangements with strategic third-party vendors to support recovery of our core functions. Some of the methods we use include:

  • Switched redirect service—A service provided by our telecommunications carrier that allows a predetermined group of incoming calls to Piper Jaffray and toll-free numbers to be forwarded to an alternate location.
  • Multiple data centers—Our strategic relationship with a large technology services company enables us to distribute critical applications across multiple data centers.
  • Diverse network infrastructure—We have built resiliency into the Piper Jaffray data communications network using redundant circuits to key sites supported by diverse carriers.

We have posted this disclosure on our Web site for your reference. If you have questions or concerns, please contact your Piper Jaffray representative.

Given the unpredictable nature of business disruption events, there can be no assurance that our business continuity management program will be fully effective in mitigating all risks or within our planned timeframes. Our program is subject to modification.