Businesses start the recovery process

Companies are slowly beginning to put their businesses back together in the wake of Tuesday's terrorist attacks, relying on services provided by disaster recovery companies.

SunGard Recovery Services reports 14 customers have declared disasters - half of which were located in the World Trade Center - and 68 companies have put the disaster recovery firm on alert. Businesses in Washington and Chicago were also affected by building evacuations.

SunGard is currently using facilities in Boston, Jersey City, Long Island, Philadelphia, Herndon, Va., and Chicago to house these customer's data recovery efforts.

"The majority of events businesses can handle, but it does no good if you can't get at your equipment and data," says Dave Palermo, SunGard vice president of marketing.

Thirty-five customers of Comdisco have declared disasters, and the company expects that number to grow as businesses evaluate their building infrastructure, phone systems and utilities. Seven businesses were located in the twin towers and one business was located adjacent to them. Companies in Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles were also affected by building evacuations.

Comdisco is putting all of its resources towards these customers, which represents 1% of its 3,000 businesses. The bulk of disaster recovery is happening in Comdisco's Queens and New Jersey centers, though it's in the process of relocating customers to other centers.

"Some companies with dedicated data recovery that is up and running, could switch systems over instantaneously without a loss of operations," says John Jackson, Comdisco's president of availability solutions division. "With the loss of personnel, that has to be determined by what they did and how fast they can bring people in to do their jobs. There may be some delays in operations before they get back up and running."

While businesses begin putting their operations back together, the biggest problem will be how to support and attend to employees' emotional states.

"The problems we're seeing are so beyond the normal scope one can plan for," Zein says. "It's hard to come to grips because the human factor is so considerable. This has affected people more than I suspected it would."

Sally Cohn, Computer Alternative Processing Sites (CAPS) director of planning, says the most important action businesses should take is constant communications with their employees.

"All employees need to be notified, whether they're in recovery or not," Cohn says. "They just want to know how their fellow employee is. They either know these people by phone or e-mail and are concerned about them."

CAPS, in Shelton, Conn., is currently supporting several financial companies in New York and Connecticut, which have instituted their disaster recovery plans.

Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, which had offices in the World Trade Center, set up a call center for employee-related safety concerns and set up counseling at several locations for employees and their families. Approximately 3,500 employees in the firm's individual investor businesses worked in the World Trade Center complex.

GE Capital Information Technology Solutions and IBM Global Services' Business Continuity and Recovery Services declined to comment on their disaster recovery efforts for businesses and government institutions.

In most cases, the full magnitude of a business' loss won't be known until Wall Street opens. The financial markets are expected to remain closed Thursday.

"The big question, as we know, is how long the financial markets will be closed," says Joe Zein, president of CAPS. "It's hard to predict what they'll need when they open. Lots have been lost, whole departments are gone."

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