As a fiduciary, Boston Partners takes seriously its obligation to protect client interests from being placed at risk as a result of its inability to provide advisory services due to a natural disaster or other events that may cause a prolonged business outage or interruption.  Boston Partners has developed a business continuity plan that is designed to ensure (i) protection of our employees; (ii) continuity and survival of Boston Partners business including but not limited to protection of client records and firm property, (iii) management control of risks and exposures, (iv) preventative measures where appropriate and (v) long-term recovery of systems and infrastructure. 

To protect employees, Boston Partners:

• Posts emergency procedures in its offices
• Distributes an emergency procedures sheet to all employees
• Maintains a website that provides access to emergency procedures
• Uses a blast call system to notify employees of emergencies and status

To ensure continued operation of its business at all times Boston Partners has instituted certain measures as summarized below:

Disaster Recovery Sites:

• Boston Partners Boston office provides New York based employees with several seats equipped with workstations containing Boston Partners corporate PC image in cubes, offices and conference rooms and the ability to access Boston Partners core production and Disaster Recovery (DR) servers hosted in our primary and secondary data centers, respectively.
• Our DR hot site provides Boston Partners with 20 shared and 10 dedicated seats. The site is equipped with workstations containing Boston Partners corporate PC image and internet connectivity with secure VPN tunnels connecting to Boston Partners DR systems hosted in our DR / secondary data center and all production systems hosted in the primary production data center.

Electronic Backups

• In our secondary / disaster recovery data center, the Firm backs up electronic records daily by using Veeam to backup to local disk which is replicated to a second disk copy at our primary production data center. The Firm also uses Veeam to backup files to tape as well as to archive the month end backups to tape for 7 years.  Tapes are stored offsite at a third-party data storage vendor.  All weekly full backups are stored on disk or tape for 6 months and all month-end full backups are stored offsite on tape for 7 years.
• In our primary production data center, the Firm backs up electronic records daily by using Veeam to backup to local disk which is replicated to a second disk copy at our secondary / DR data center. The Firm also uses Veeam to backup files to tape as well as to archive the month end backups to tape for 7 years.  Tapes are stored offsite at a third-party data storage vendor.  All weekly full backups are stored on disk or tape for 6 months and all month-end full backups are stored offsite on tape for 7 years.

• Boston Partner’s Fund Administrator provides application access that enables Boston Partners employees to securely manage accounts and run reports from a web browser or mobile device using a secure connection.
• Boston Partners uses replication software to allow real time replication of critical virtualized systems between our production and recovery data center.  In addition, intraday data dumps are in place for any critical systems using a physical database, to maintain an up-to-date replica of the database in the recovery data center.
• Critical file shares are replicated up to the minute to the recovery data center for DR purposes.
• The Boston Partners e-mail environment in the primary data center is replicated in real time to the recovery data center for DR purposes.
• The Boston Partners e-mail environment journals copies of all incoming, outgoing, and internal messages to the in-place hold folder for the duration of seven years.  All journaled emails are searchable and nonerasable.
• Boston Partners uses a backup solution for Microsoft Office 365.  This backup solution protects any of our data stored on Microsoft’s Office 365 platform, including SharePoint Online, One Drive for Business and Microsoft Teams.

February 2024