When the entire top floor of an office block adjacent to consulting company Watson Wyatt’s London offices collapsed in June 2007, the earth-shattering crash put employees in mind of the bombings that had struck the capital two years previously.

But this was no terrorist attack. Rather, this catastrophic event was triggered by an unforeseen structural miscalculation made during renovation work on the five-storey building, located in the Victoria area. With debris scattered around all the exits from the Watson Wyatt office, there was a fear that more destruction was to come.

At six o’clock that Tuesday afternoon – two hours after the collapse – Watson Wyatt’s emergency response team took the decision to invoke the disaster recovery service it had contracted from SunGard Availability Services. While no actual damage had been sustained to its office building, all means of entry were blocked apart from one. Even that was partially obstructed by emergency services vehicles, which would have made any emergency evacuation impossible.

On with the show

The next day, 220 of the 475 London-based staff went to work at SunGard’s Paris Garden Recover Centre, across the Thames near Waterloo – slightly more than its contract with SunGard provided for. The remaining workforce was either relocated to regional offices or worked from home. The fact that Watson Wyatt employed a virtualised desktop environment, based on Citrix technology, meant work could continue despite the total displacement of the London office.

More problematic for the human capital and financial management specialist was the fact that the close of its tax year was fast approaching. That meant that a host of invoices and purchase orders were due for submission, and many of these were sitting in paper form in the evacuated office building. As the days wound on, this became a serious issue.

“We are still reliant on paper for billing and invoicing because many of our clients do not have the systems to do it electronically,” explains Vijay Bains, Watson Wyatt’s risk manager.

“But that paper became a big issue when we had to relocate.” Eventually, the decision was taken to send the facilities team into the deserted office to salvage select documents.

Although many employees worked from home during Watson Wyatt’s two-week exile, Bains reports that ensuring the business had an alternative location in which to work was highly valuable.

“We had been wondering whether remote working would have been enough,” he recalls. “When you experience an incident like this, employees need somewhere to meet and work together.”

It was the mix of disaster recovery precautions that Watson Wyatt had taken that made it so resilient, Bains argues. “The incident really was a vindication of all the investment we had made in business continuity,” he recalls.

“Of course, we had tested our systems and run dummy scenarios, but only by experiencing the event did we find out that we had the right mix of precautions.”

Watson Wyatt has been a SunGard customer since 2002, contracting for its Workplace Recovery, QuickShip hardware recovery and Electronic Vaulting services. During the June 2007 event, staff worked out of the SunGard facility for eight days in total.

“Business continuity precautions are like insurance policies,” he adds. “There is an overwhelming sense of relief when you find out it works.”

Further reading:

Terrorism: IT’s response Events in recent years have forced organisations to take the impact of a terrorist attack seriously.

Staying afloat The widespread flooding that hit the UK this summer proved a severe test for many businesses’ disaster recovery measures

Find more stories in the Security & Continuity Briefing Room