Symetra Financial Corporation and its subsidiaries (Symetra) are committed to reducing the risks and impacts engendered by a potential disruption through the continuing support of our Business Continuity Management (BCM) program.
Symetra has developed a Business Continuity Management (BCM) program that encompasses four major components: Crisis and Incident Management, Emergency Preparedness and Response, Business Continuity Planning and Technology Resilience (Disaster Recovery). Each of these components consists of dedicated plans, procedures, and communication paths.
The Symetra Business Continuity and Technology Resilience policy and plans were developed, and are maintained, with senior management oversight and approval for the methodology, processes, and procedures necessary to protect our employees, to continue or resume business during a major event, and to restore access to information and services for our customers and producers. The plans were developed using the guidelines for best practices from respected sources such as the Disaster Recovery Institute International (DRII), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other recognized organizations for business continuity and disaster recovery. Senior management formally reviews and approves the Symetra policy and plans annually.
The Crisis Management Team (CMT) acts as the central communication and decision-making hub for the organization in the event of a major disaster that impacts business operations. The CMT is comprised of executive management and business leaders from across the organization to provide strategy and resources as required. The CMT serves to ensure the safety and security of our employees, contractors, visitors, customers, and partners, to recover critical business processes or technology systems in a timely and efficient manner, and to maintain communication with our stakeholders during a disaster or major incident. The Crisis Management Team Plan is reviewed and exercised through a variety of scenarios on an annual basis.
Symetra understands the importance of sustainability and strives to make conscience business decisions that protect the health, safety and well-being of our employees, contractors, visitors, customers, partners and those in the communities in which we operate.
Our Emergency Response Plans integrate into our overall BCM program and address life safety issues such as medical emergencies, shelter in place, and emergency evacuations.
In the event of a building emergency, Symetra Workplace Services works in conjunction with Property Management resources and Symetra CMT to mitigate issues within the workplace environment. Life safety processes and procedures exist to protect employees and guests located at our facility during an emergency. In alignment with local building code and property management requirements, Symetra sites may perform evacuation drills.
Symetra’s Business Continuity Planning focuses on plans for each business unit. The Business Continuity Plans cover emergency response, notification, and work-around procedures for the loss of internal or external dependencies to critical business processes. Business Continuity Plans are exercised through a variety of scenarios on an annual basis. The exercise scope, objective, and approach are designed with guidance from senior management.
Business processes are ranked by recovery priority. Business units are required to participate in a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to determine and identify the impacts of an outage or interruption of a business process to the company. The BIA methodology is used to determine the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of each business process and the required operational dependencies. The BIAs and the Business Continuity Plans are reviewed and approved by management annually to ensure that they account for changes to the operations, technology, structure, location, and strategies.
The Symetra Business Continuity plans are derived from the results of a risk-based analysis, strategies, and mitigations and contain the following key components:
Symetra hosts a workplace environment that offers flexibility to employees working in and out of the office by providing laptops, VPN (virtual private networks) access and wireless network capabilities. To prepare for disruptions, Symetra maintains layers of redundancy in critical roles including geographically dispersed employees, multiple personnel that can perform critical functions, and offices in several cities across the United States.
Symetra vendor management teams have established monitoring of critical third-party service providers to assess Business Continuity and Information Technology Recovery program levels, as good practice and in alignment with regulatory influences.
Symetra’s Pandemic Response and Continuity plan is based on World Health Organization (WHO), US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and regulatory influences to guide Symetra’s response activities and provide continued operation of services through the pandemic.
Symetra’s technology resiliency utilizes a variety of solutions to provide availability and recoverability of our systems and data that align to business criticality. These solutions protect the business and are designed to reduce the impact of a disruption to our customers and partners, while protecting reputation and sustainability. The technology recovery plan specifies the resources and activities required to re-establish information technology services (including components such as data centers, cloud resources, networks, servers, applications, and data) at an alternate site following a disruption. The level of resiliency is defined through business-driven risk decisions intended to align with the organizational risk appetite. In case of a catastrophic outage at our data center, Symetra would activate its secondary (recovery) site. Our cloud-based systems are designed and backed up utilizing native cloud-based resilience and multiple backup instances. Symetra utilizes enterprise class data centers in the United States.
Data Centers used by Symetra’s production environments are in hardened facilities that meet or exceed industry standard protective measures for power, cooling, physical security, cyber-security, interconnectivity, and natural or human-caused hazard mitigation.
After a significant business disruption, if you are not able to reach us at 1-800-796-3872 (1-800-SYMETRA), please visit our website at www.symetra.com for updates and/or to contact us.
Due to the confidentiality of the information contained within our Plans (Crisis and Incident Management, Emergency Preparedness and Response, Business Continuity and Technology Resilience, Pandemic Response and Continuity), it is our policy not to share copies to outside parties. However, we would be happy to respond to specific inquiries you may have.
For additional information on Symetra’s Business Continuity Management (BCM) Program please Email Us.
Rev. February 4, 2024
Document available for current or prospective clients and partners.