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Business Continuity Plan
General Outline of the Plan
Lord Abbett Distributor LLC's most important goal is to put our clients first. In that spirit, we are committed to ensuring that we can continue to service shareholders of the Lord Abbett Funds even when events occur which could potentially disrupt our business.
Lord Abbett Distributor's parent company, Lord, Abbett & Co. LLC, maintains a Business Continuity Plan (BCP), that is designed to address potential issues that may arise. The activities of Lord Abbett Distributor are covered in the BCP. We review the plan at least annually and test it on an ongoing basis. Elements of the plan include: redundant equipment for power and air conditioning in our primary location; real-time offsite mirroring of systems that have been designated mission-critical; and multiple facilities around the New York metropolitan area and around the region that can function as alternative working locations for our staff. For those functions that are outsourced to a third party, we require service level commitments that meet our requirements and address business continuity. In addition, Lord Abbett conducts periodic due diligence on the business-continuity capabilities of our key service providers.
It is impossible to forecast every potential problem that may occur, but we believe we have taken prudent and reasonable precautions to enable us to continue conducting business under a great variety of problem scenarios. In addition, the plan includes several important degrees of flexibility that could be used in case of unexpected problem conditions.
Examples of scenarios requiring the use of business-continuity capabilities include:
Lord Abbett Distributor LLC's most important goal is to put our clients first. In that spirit, we are committed to ensuring that we can continue to service shareholders of the Lord Abbett Funds even when events occur which could potentially disrupt our business.
Lord Abbett Distributor's parent company, Lord, Abbett & Co. LLC, maintains a Business Continuity Plan (BCP), that is designed to address potential issues that may arise. The activities of Lord Abbett Distributor are covered in the BCP. We review the plan at least annually and test it on an ongoing basis. Elements of the plan include: redundant equipment for power and air conditioning in our primary location; real-time offsite mirroring of systems that have been designated mission-critical; and multiple facilities around the New York metropolitan area and around the region that can function as alternative working locations for our staff. For those functions that are outsourced to a third party, we require service level commitments that meet our requirements and address business continuity. In addition, Lord Abbett conducts periodic due diligence on the business-continuity capabilities of our key service providers.
It is impossible to forecast every potential problem that may occur, but we believe we have taken prudent and reasonable precautions to enable us to continue conducting business under a great variety of problem scenarios. In addition, the plan includes several important degrees of flexibility that could be used in case of unexpected problem conditions.
Examples of scenarios requiring the use of business-continuity capabilities include:
- Firm-only business disruption: data center rendered unavailable.
The data for mission critical systems are maintained in real time at one of our offsite disaster-recovery locations. In the event of the loss of our primary data center for any reason, we would fail our systems over to the disaster-recovery location and continue processing. This fail-over can be implemented virtually immediately. Under this scenario, we would continue business during the disruption. - Disruption to a single building: building unavailable.
If our building were rendered unavailable, certain of our staff would deploy to one or more predetermined locations around the New York metropolitan area, and others would work from their homes. If any of the predetermined locations were not available, we could send the affected staff members to one of the other recovery sites. Under this scenario, we would continue business during the disruption. - Regional disruption: building and region impacted.
Lord Abbett has made arrangements for disaster-recovery equipment and workspace outside of the New York metropolitan area. We could call on these facilities at any time without notice. In the case of a regional disaster, we would redeploy our business to one or more of these facilities. Under this scenario, we would continue business during the disruption.