Peer to Peer Magazine

60 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | WINTER 2017 The Context In the fall of 2001, Sidley Austin was in the midst of a merger with Brown & Wood. Sidley Austin was located in the Citicorp Center, midtown Manhaan; Brown & Wood was located in the top floors of the WTC. Sidley had engaged Baker Robbins & Company to assist with the conversion of Brown & Wood email and document management systems from Lotus Notes/PC DOCS to Exchange/iManage. As chance would have it, on Saturday, September 8, 2011, the Sidley iManage and Exchange teams were in New York City to move Sidley's data center servers from midtown to downtown. The server move was a success and the team was finishing up testing and support efforts in the WTC before returning to Chicago and elsewhere. At the time, Sidley desktops ran Exchange/ iManage while Brown & Wood desktops were running Lotus Notes/PC DOCS: two completely separate desktop environments with two distinct backend infrastructures. Three days later, the aacks occurred. Sidley got very lucky, because a comprehensive testing platform was in place in the Chicago lab that enabled the team to leverage existing systems for recovery effort by promoting test environments to house production databases and documents once restoration of the New York-based data was completed. This proved invaluable, as it eliminated the need to set up servers, databases, connections, etc. Rising Strong: A 9/11 Disaster Recovery Case Study LESSONS LEARNED Rising Strong: A 9/11 Disaster Recovery Case Study In the wake of hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Jose and Maria, I thought it prudent to provide my perspective on the Sidley Austin Brown & Wood disaster recovery efforts following the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) that occurred sixteen years ago on September 11, 2001. LESSONS LEARNED LIZA MADDEN Liza Madden formed Implement-Inc in 2016 to advise legal organizations on the successful deployment of technology, realizing greater efficiency, improving client service and driving compliance with company policies. Implement-Inc specializes in information governance technology, with a strong focus on information security in law firms and Fortune 1000 legal departments. As a thirty-year veteran of the legal information technology space, Liza has served the Legal IT industry in a variety of capacities, specializing in delivering projects on time and on budget. by Liza Madden

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