CHERRY DAN S.

VILLADARES
BSA-4

HOW PREPARED IS THE WORLD TRADE CENTER FOR A DISASTER?

The World Trade Center, one of the largest complex of buildings in Manhattan, New
York was known to us as the tallest twin towers at the time of their completion.
Rather than being known as a super skyscraper, it has been inclined to our minds that
this was the infamous place where thousands of people and millions of dollars of
infrastructure, security and technology was put to waste due to the brutal terrorist
attack of the Islamic group al-Qaeda on September 11,2001.

Looking back 17 years ago, New York was one of the most technologically advanced
cities in the world. Yes they may have been prepared but so as the terrorist. These
disasters will surely happen again, sooner or later, so it is critical that these lessons be
learned. The 9/11 attack was a wake-up call for many IT managers who had nit
contemplated the possibility of their entire computing systems being destroyed
without warning. Thousands of people during the 9/11 disaster were missing and
assumed dead, other than that, companies that were housed in the towers are facing
computer equipment losses of ＄500 million, according to financial services firm
Morgan Stanley.

But one assets most of the tenants avoided on losing on September 11 was electronic
data. They have learned a valuable lesson after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing
to back up information often and completely. This attack allowed companies to
prepare for possible future disasters by investing in data storage and recovery services
to protect reams of electronic information that they produced on a daily basis.
Companies who occupied the towers were mainly brokerage, financial and insurance
firms which relied heavily on their IT to run their business.

NASDAQ can be a great example for this; they did not just have a back up, they have
a distributed system also. Rather than investing to an only data security (re: back -up),
entities that required IT on their daily basis should not only have a main office. In a
businessman’s perspective, it is like branching out. You have the main office
somewhere else and you’ll have another branch. The good thing about NASDAQ is
that only one of their offices was hit, although it is their headquarters where executive
and sales staff where, not their primary data center. But as a brokerage firm, the
disaster was a very crucial time for their IT. In a stock market, every second count, so
shutting down their systems on one office would trigger their daily operational work.
Still, some of their systems from different locations were up because they have
servers in different buildings. They have 20 connection centers around the United
States and every single server connects to two of their centers through different paths,
including Manhattan.

Most companies use one of two methods to back up their computer systems. Smaller
companies tend toward the cheaper option of manually downloading data onto
magnetic tapes, while larger companies rely on “hot back-ups”, a service that can cost
companies tens of thousand of dollars a month. The latter option simultaneously
copies al electronic data entered into the company’s system onto an off-site computer
over high-speed lines. When disaster strikes, hot back-ups allow companies to tap into
a live system with little or no interruption. Backup tapes don’t have the same
advantages; it takes at least 24 hours to extricate the information form magnetic tapes
and transfers it into a new system. If you back up your system once every seven days -
say, every Friday night - and a disaster occurs Friday morning, you’ve lost a week’s
worth of work. Also, if a company stores backup tapes onsite and their offices are
wiped out, they are at a total loss. This has made a lot of companies realize the
potential of losing IT infrastructure and what it will do to them.

Many companies in the World Trade Center switched to hot backups after 1993
bombing attack, according to EMC, a data management system located in Hopkinton,
Massachusetts. EMC had 25 clients located in the World Trade Center. If there may
be a problem, the system will automatically contact EMC to say there is a problem.

Sungard, a recovery service with seven World Trade Center clients, were able to
provide office space and equipment to their clients within hours of the attack.
Although their clients relied in tapes for data storage, they did not lose much
information because the attack happened early Tuesday morning, and the company
could rebuild systems using tapes that were sent to storage on Monday evening.

Comdisco, a data recovery and storage business, mirrors 80 terabytes of information

for seven customers who were housed in the World Trade Center. The company
bought more than 3,000 personal computers to support their clients who lost
equipment in the attack.

A week after the attack obliterated their respective offices, tenants of the World Trade
Center are slowly piecing their businesses back together again.
17 years after 9/11, cloud storage and disaster recovery remain high-growth areas in
the IT industry. It geared people toward a completely different way of thinking.
Everyone has always had backup and back-up plans, in which large company already
has. The attack spurred the creation of more robust IT systems and led to a focus on
disaster recovery. The 9/11 attacks showed that simple-to-use hacking tools are
available to people with limited IT skills.

Overall, no single person or a huge empire can go down with a fight with a disaster,
be it natural or unnatural. As for our technology today, bright minds may have been
making ways to assess recent disasters and make way for preparedness but so as the
people who brings harm to our society. But one’s things for sure, if an entity would
invest on data security and preparedness they can get away with losses of, data or
millions.