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Data are gold to the financial community, and Wall Street protected them like the bullion at Fort Knox. Brokerages, banks and other finance companies are required by law to back up securities transaction data, and in the last decade those organizations became some of the most sophisticated buyers of IT storage services, contracting with companies such as EMC and Hitachi for the latest devices, and archiving their digital records in remote, bunker-like facilities operated by companies like Iron Mountain, based in Boston. Account records and trading transactions are typically backed up in real time.
Harder hit by the attacks were law firms and insurance companies--paper-intensive businesses whose critical documents scattered like confetti. "We lost bound volumes, transaction documents, correspondence files," says Jack Williams, a managing partner at the law firm Thacher, Proffitt & Wood, which lost its offices on floors 38 to 40 at 2 World Trade Center. New scanning technology could mitigate those losses in the future: the latest optical-character-reading scanners, produced by Hewlett-Packard and Canon, can create digital archives of documents, enabling them to be accessed as CD-ROMs. "We've purchased additional scanners since the attacks, and we'll probably use more of them," says Williams.
--Have an Alternate Office Ready
After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (which killed six people), the New York Board of Trade decided to lease office space in Long Island City, Queens, from a company based in Rosemont, Ill., called Comdisco, which specializes in helping companies recover from disasters and prepare for them. N.Y.B.O.T. spent $300,000 a year to keep the space stocked with computers, phones and plenty of back-office servers, switches and IT gear. Two trading pits were ready to go.
"We'd been running tests at this site for six years," says exchange vice president Pat Gambaro. The exchange is paying Comdisco $5,000 a day, anticipating a two- to four-month stay before it can find a new permanent home. The alternative? "If we didn't have a backup site, another exchange would have taken over our trading," says Gambaro. "We'd be out of business." The exchange's temporary digs--surrounded by auto-body shops, garment factories and an elevated train--are a far cry from Wall Street. But trader Chris O'Neill, 33, is glad to be working, and says of his management: "They were well prepared for this disaster."
For temporary work spaces, non-U.S. firms such as Germany's Dresdner Bank and Royal Bank of Canada also contracted with Comdisco, cramming employees into its Queens facility, which had been outfitted with computers and IT support. Lehman Bros. moved hundreds of workers to its office in Jersey City, N.J., and rented 665 rooms at a Sheraton Manhattan hotel for 1,500 bankers and analysts, carting in fax machines, computers, copiers and desks.