Insurer IT Systems Survive WTC Attacks

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

As for service interruptions, "I suspect no one was calling [for financial products] at that moment," Honeyman says. "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, Honeyman adds. "Nothing critical has been lost, especially our critical financial data." She notes that the company may have lost "a few e-mails," but emphasizes that "we really haven't stopped serving customers."

Displaced workers 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.

"We're tired because of the tremendous effort involved," Honeyman says. "Everyone's been pulling together. People are strong when they have to be."

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

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

"It didn't affect us greatly," Friel says. Many of the operations normally handled by the New York site are now being managed at a Prudential IT command center in New Jersey. The biggest problem, he says, 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 Prudential's local circuits, Friel says. 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 Corp., Chicago. While no company spokesman was available, 1 World Trade Center housed Aon employees from the insurance brokerage, human resource consulting, claims servicing, specialty operations, and accident, health and life insurance underwriting units, according to the Aon Web site.

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

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

Still, says the Aon site, "all of Aon's 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.