The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center were a dramatictest of the business continuity management programs of some of NewYorks leading financial services firms. Most business continuitystrategies never envisioned a disruptive event of the nature,scope, or duration of what took place on September 11.

Deloitte & Touche was one of the firms directly affected bythe attacksits New York office was located across the street fromthe World Trade Center. That office is now closed with more than3,000 employees displaced and working out of temporary facilitiesaround New York.

In a TechDEC session titled, Beating Murphys Law: DisasterPlanning and Recovery That Can Save Your Business, Brian Lane, apartner in Deloitte & Touches enterprise risk servicesdivision, will distill some of the lessons learned from September11 and other economic, social, technological, and geocentric eventsthat have been converging over the past decade, all of which posethreats to the continuity of business operations.

An important lesson from September 11, according to Lane, isthat todays business environment is riskier and less predictablethan ever before. It requires a new approach focused on optimizingthe availability of all mission-critical assetspeople, processes,data, technology, and facilitieswhether addressing disastersituations or limiting downtime in the normal course of business.The elements for this new approach to business continuitymanagement were detailed in a March 2002 report by Deloitte &Touche titled, Recovery PlanningA New Paradigm for Business, andwill be highlighted during Lanes program.

The Deloitte report says the new approach to business continuitymanagement maintains that people issues are paramount. It states,Many firms found that they were not adequately prepared to providealternative offices, telephone lines, and computers to displacedemployees. Employers quickly learned that while they might have hadredundant data systems, the people who ran the systems, madebusiness decisions, or maintained customer relationships could notbe duplicated. Given this experience, a number of banks in the UKhave decided to lease contingency office space located outsidecentral cities and separate from their backup data centers.

Another example of this approach concerns the testing ofsystems. Deloittes report notes, Some firms found that their backupdata centers lacked real-time data and had problems communicatingsmoothly with the backup data centers of other firms. As asolution, the report suggests frequent testing of businesscontinuity plans is essential and must include the other firms andexchanges with which the company needs to communicate.

Says Lane: Earthquakes, tornadoes, terrorist attacks, fires,computer viruses, and other disastrous events can interruptbusiness operations at any time. However, customers expectuninterrupted serviceeven when disaster strikes.

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Beating Murphys Law: Disaster and Recovery That Can SaveYourBusiness
A TechDECSession
Friday, September 13