Towering rebuild: what I learnt from 9/11
Published: 11 Sep 2002 10:17 BST
As I stood on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Houston Street and watched my office on the 85th floor of the north tower collapse that Tuesday morning, wondering if my coworkers were trapped inside, business continuity planning was the last thing on my mind.
Eight long hours after the collapse of the building, I learned that of the three people in the office at 8:46, all had escaped by racing down the 85 flights of stairs, only to narrowly miss being caught in the debris cloud when the south tower fell.
Our focus immediately after the attack was on the most important things -- establishing communication and making sure that everyone in the office had survived. Once that was done, we quickly realised that despite the unbelievable circumstances, our business could not stand still. Messages were flooding in through our Web site from people concerned about our safety, and hundreds of people in our organisation were dependent on us. So we all set aside our emotions and shock and started working again.
I was a developer for the eBusiness group of Thermo Electron, a global technology and manufacturing company. In the weeks after September 11, I worked alongside my managers Markus Leibundgut and Dom Wissmann, and the other members of our group, to rebuild our Web operations. Here's a look at how our original continuity plans worked under worst-case-scenario conditions, and how the experience permanently changed how one company will plan for the future.
Thanks to moderate business continuity measures, like off-site servers, and some lucky coincidences with laptops, Thermo resurrected itself within a matter of weeks. But the company isn't leaving disaster recovery plans to half-measures or chance from now on.
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