Terrorist Attack Doesnt Keep Insurer IT Systems Down For Long

The servers handled e-mail and local data storage for the offices, which did business in commercial lines, workers compensation and other property-casualty lines.

Activities at the site included underwriting, sales, claims processing and claims litigation, as well as administrative functions, according to Mr. Dale.

When the World Trade Center attacks occurred, a command center was "mobilized" at Kempers corporate headquarters in Long Grove, Ill. As the mornings events unfolded and the buildings collapsed, said Mr. Dale, a team at the command center began calling the affected employees and their families to ascertain that they had safely escaped.

"We took a vow that no one was leaving [the command center] until everyone was accounted for," said Mr. Dale. "We were done on Tuesday night [Sept. 11] by midnight."

At the same time, Kemper began calling key equipment vendors for immediate delivery of 200 desktop computers and 150 laptops, Mr. Dale explained.

The company also contacted telecommunications vendors who re-routed the Trade Center facilitys 800 numbers back to Long Grove.

"There was not a lot of [telephone] interruption," he noted. "The 800 service was basically seamless."

Meanwhile, there was the problem of restoring lost data. The company procured new servers for that purpose and located them in Long Grove, said Mr. Dale.

Then began the process of recovering some 70 gigabytes of business data and 30GB of e-mail. The process began early on Sept. 11 and by 10:30 that night, the servers were "reconstructed" for e-mail, he noted.

"By 4 a.m. the next morning, all the business data was recovered," he said.

The next step was for Kemper to find space in its existing facilities in the New York area for the more than 200 employees who were displaced. According to Mr. Dale, space was identified in Princeton, N.J.; Berkeley Heights, N.J.; Melville, N.Y.; Elmsford, N.Y.; Jersey City, N.J.; and Hauppauge, N.Y. By 10 a.m. on Sept. 12, trucks in Illinois were packed with computers, some 300 telephones, networking cards, ports, hubs and switches–all bound for the New York area.

Kemper also dispatched a team of 10 technicians to accompany the equipment on its 17-hour drive to New York to help with setup and configuration at the alternate work sites, said Mr. Dale.

By Friday, Sept. 14, every displaced employee who needed a workstation had one, said Mr. Dale.

"The technicians stayed through the weekend to clear up any problems," he added, noting that they were to return home on Sept. 18 via the companys corporate jet.

Mr. Dale said Kemper is "aggressively looking for real estate in Manhattan" to relocate its displaced employees.

Meanwhile, he noted, "we feel proud of what we were able to pull off and how we were able to recover." He added that a grief counselor will be available for the technicians when they return.

The Hartford also lost offices housing 320 employees, with no likely casualties. "I cant say definitively, but Im pretty sure we havent lost anyone," noted Sue Honeyman, a media relations representative for the Connecticut-based insurer, when she was interviewed for this story the week of Sept. 17.

The Hartford had offices in 7 World Trade Center, a nearby building that was evacuated following the attacks, and which later collapsed. According to Ms. Honeyman, the company lost all of the servers, personal computers and office automation equipment at the site. She was unable to put a value on the lost hardware.

Ms. Honeyman said the company is "moving rapidly" to have its displaced employees "business functional" at other nearby sites. The locations include Rockaway, N.J.; Hauppauge, N.Y.; Valhalla, N.Y.; Florham Park, N.J.; Lake Success, N.Y.; and Shelton, Conn.

The only operation housed in the 7 World Trade Center facility was Hartford Financial Products, said Ms. Honeyman. "We had a couple of floors in that building. It was the business we acquired from Reliance about a year ago."

Asked about service interruptions, Ms. Honeyman noted, "I suspect no one was calling [for financial products] at that moment. There was some loss of service, but it was readily and quickly picked up by other offices."

Data from the collapsed facility was backed up at other sites, Ms. Honeyman added. "Nothing critical has been lost, especially our critical financial data." She noted that the company may have lost "a few e-mails," but asserted that "we really havent stopped serving customers."

Displaced workers, said Ms. Honeyman, have been reassigned to the nearby sites that are closest to their homes. The company is in the process of shipping PCs, printers and other equipment to the alternate work sites.

"Were tired because of the tremendous effort involved," said Ms. Honeyman. "Everyones been pulling together. People are strong when they have to be."

As to paying for the damages, Ms. Honeyman added, "we have insurance."

Another company with facilities near the attack site was the Prudential Insurance Company of America. According to Bill Friel, chief information officer of the Newark, N.J.-based carrier, there were no casualties and there was no direct damage to the Prudential offices at 1 New York Plaza.

The damage to the surrounding area, however, made it difficult for employees who work there to get to the office. As a result, said Mr. Friel, as of Sept. 17 Prudential had only a skeleton staff at 1 New York Plaza since the day of the attacks.

"It didnt affect us greatly," said Mr. Friel. Many of the operations normally done at the New York site were taken over and are being managed at Prudentials IT command center in Roseland, N.J.

The biggest problem, he noted, is that the batch processing that would normally take place is finding no files to send. The additional search time taken by the systems has slowed down the process, "so the system gets ready for the online updates cycle a little later than it would have."

The attack area also sustained "bad damage" to telephone lines, cutting off many of Prudentials local circuits, Mr. Friel said. The company has been working with telecommunications vendors to find alternate routings and to prioritize which circuits will be repaired first.

One of the companies most severely affected–in terms of missing employees–is Aon. While no company representative was available, according to the Aon Web site, One World Trade Center (one of the two collapsed towers) housed Aon employees from the insurance brokerage, human resource consulting, claims servicing, other specialty operations, and accident, health and life insurance underwriting.

Aon was able to re-route data traffic that flowed through the World Trade Center within one hour, the site noted. "Other critical business processing systems were recovered and relocated, outside New York, within 24 hours. Policy consulting and other client-related information is being recovered, principally through our own systems, but also through outstanding cooperation from carriers and clients," the company said.

Aon noted that its financial records and systems are "fully intact," but added that "other electronic data, principally e-mail and hard copy documents that were not electronically imaged may be less recoverable."

Still, said the Aon site, "all of Aons normal processing systems are up and running."

The Aon site reports that the company is working to establish new office space in midtown Manhattan for displaced employees. Some of those employees have already been temporarily assigned to other Aon offices in the New York area.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, October 1, 2001. Copyright 2001 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.

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