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This article highlights increasing pressure on brokerages and other financial services firms in the U.S. to define and test their information technology (IT) disaster recovery plans as of May 2004. Wall Street firms are also being pushed by the federal government and regulators to consider moving their backup data centers farther away from their primary computing facilities. A combination of peer pressure and regulatory pressure is prodding companies to ensure that their systems will keep running if a disaster occurs. Nasdaq announced two weeks ago that it had run tests at its two data centers to check the disaster recovery capabilities of member companies. The tests involved more than 50 brokerages and were conducted at the exchange's primary data center in Connecticut in February 2004 and at its backup facility in Maryland in April 2004. Large financial services firms also face an April 2006 deadline for meeting new federal guidelines on increased resiliency for trade clearance and settlement activities. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury Department's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency set the guidelines in spring 2004.