Protecting High-Tech Data a Growing Priority

The computerized brain of First Interstate Bancorp is in an unmarked nine-story building near the Harbor Freeway in downtown Los Angeles, less than a mile from the bank’s towering headquarters.

For 24 hours a day, its nerve endings receive information about withdrawals, deposits and loans made by the bank’s network throughout California. The vital information is kept separate from headquarters--in case something should happen to the main building.

This week, something happened.

As fire disrupted operations at the big bank, the strategy paid off. “There are enough eggs in the headquarters basket,” explained Simon Barker-Benfield, a vice president with the bank corporation. “You don’t want any more. I don’t know of any major bank that would have a center like this in their main headquarters.”

Like a person with amnesia, a big company with damage to its main computers can have trouble reconstructing its identity: its base of clients, assets, billings and debts. And for all the sophistication of modern technology, computers are not invulnerable.

Fires, floods, earthquakes and other disasters all can wreak havoc on a data system. Moreover, even if it is unharmed, properly working telecommunications lines are typically needed to keep a modern computer network properly linked.

The stakes? “Two weeks without computer capabilities and some companies might cease to exist,” maintained Philip S. Wein, a partner with the big accounting firm of Coopers & Lybrand in Los Angeles.

Because the stakes are so high--particularly for banks, insurance firms and others that rely on huge amounts of data--companies increasingly are fashioning elaborate plans to protect themselves. While strategies vary, depending on the considerations of a particular business, they tend to have certain things in common, according to experts in the field.

Computer systems are engineered so that damage to any single part will not destroy the whole. Data kept in the form of magnetic tape reels is stored in carefully secured locations. And companies should have contingency plans for hooking up to other computers if necessary, specialists counsel.

“A building is easy to replace,” said Frank M. Piluso, a senior vice president of computing and communications at California Federal Savings & Loan. “Protecting the data--that’s the hard part.”

Piluso speaks with rare authority. When he reported for work at CalFed’s computer center in Rosemead on the day of the Whittier earthquake last Oct. 1, he entered a scene of devastation: Part of a ceiling had collapsed over one of the main computers; other computers were jolted off their footings, scratching circles on the tile floor. Big glass window panels were shattered. Worst of all, water from a broken pipe was leaking through the ceiling onto the equipment, and the electricity was out.

“When we did the initial damage assessment, I thought we were history,” he recalled.

Piluso declared an emergency and ordered workers to load thousands of magnetic tapes onto specially air-conditioned trucks, manned by armed guards. The trucks were directed to two “hot sites”--facilities with reserved computers--that the thrift had planned on using for such an occasion.

Technology Vulnerable

One truck drove to a facility that CalFed owns in Phoenix, where its clients include government agencies, financial service companies and manufacturers. The other truck was dispatched to a site near San Diego, operated by Sungard Recovery Services.

Ultimately, the backup facilities weren’t needed. CalFed managed to bring its Rosemead computer center back to life the next day. To Piluso, the backup sites serve as crucially important life insurance policies: “If we weren’t successful here, we could have shifted to those cities,” he said.

While the impact of the earthquake was painfully visible--90,000 ceiling tiles fell down, Piluso said--modern technology is vulnerable to less obvious threats. For example, a fire can create invisible vapors that are carried throughout a building by the ventilation system. Such vapors can be drawn into a computer’s own ventilation system, damaging parts and causing future errors on the data. The fire might be on the 12th floor, Wein said, but “the damage could be on the 32nd.”

Such dangers give rise to a fundamental principle in safeguarding computer data: redundancy. Simply put, if there is more than one copy of something, its destruction need cause only a temporary problem.

This approach is evident at First Interstate, where the downtown computer center is one of seven maintained by the bank throughout the West. “Redundancy is what you’re after,” Benfield said. “You don’t want to be reliant on one piece of machinery.”

To ease such excessive reliance, an industry is starting to emerge in which companies offer protected storage space for other companies’ computer records. Arcus Inc., for example, serves 2,500 data centers and maintains a 22,000-square-foot facility in the City of Commerce. The center is protected, among other things, by barbed wire, steel doors and bulletproof glass.

Even its location was carefully chosen: It is outside major flight patterns, according to Richard Drutman, an Arcus vice president.

“Data managers used to drive the tapes home in the trunk of their car,” Drutman recalled. “Now, instead of putting it in the trunk of their car, instead of storing it in the basement of their building, they’re looking for professional service.”

Comdisco Disaster Recovery Services, based in Rosemont, Ill., operates 14 fully equipped data centers, or “hot sites,” throughout the United States and plans to expand into Europe.

“You need a place to go if there’s severe damage to a data center,” said Raymond R. Hipp, the company’s president. “We’re the place to go.”

While such statements may do no harm to Hipp’s business, those who have experienced a disaster agree that the alternative to careful backup plans is chaos: “One hour, two hours (without the use of computers) is no big deal,” said CalFed’s Piluso. “But after a while, you don’t know who’s supposed to get what.”