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THE STORY OF THE DEPOSITORY TRUST & CLEARING CORPORATION
are likely damaged. However, all of DTCC’s computer records are fully intact, including detailed inventory files of all certificates held in the vault.” It was not just the certificates that were swamped. The data center was taken out as well. Bob Garrison had been in his role as managing director and chief information officer for just a few months when Sandy hit New York. “I remember getting a call—it must have been around 8 p.m.—and they said that we’d lost our data center, and my immediate reaction was: ‘What do you mean, we’ve lost our data center? I’ve been working in technology for 30 years and we’ve never lost a data center where I’ve been.’” Operations quickly shifted to Brooklyn, which housed extra computers that had been purchased for an impending move of operations to New Jersey. “The IT department did an amazing job of replacing all of the old equipment and we hit the ground running,” Bodson said. “We really didn’t miss a day.” While there was some luck involved, modeling and anticipation of disasters had kept everyone prepared, as Garrison described:
In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, DTCC shifted its operations to the Brooklyn Army Terminal just south of its Manhattan headquarters, which was damaged by the hurricane’s powerful storm surge.
You conduct training and practice sessions through the years. You have run books on what you do under various scenarios and, in typical DTCC fashion, we kicked in and followed all of the
procedures. People slid right into the roles the way that they had practiced, and we started the process of scaling over from our Manhattan data center to our Brooklyn data center. While it was nerve-racking, I think it was one of the finest examples of what DTCC does and the value that it brings to the industry. While the Brooklyn office was an adequate temporary recovery site, it was not the easiest place to work. With the management team sitting side by side in a cramped 15-foot-by-15-foot space for a period of time, it did not take long for Bodson to see on the faces of his colleagues that they were being worn down. “I probably made the best business decision in my career: I stood up on the desk on Friday and thanked everybody for what they had been doing and said, ‘From now on, we’ll have free breakfast and lunch.’ It was such a simple thing to do, but it changed the morale right there. It was a recognition to everybody that we appreciated what they were going through.”
DTCC HQ
BAT
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