Better Safe Than Sorry, Pennsylvania Offers “Virtue, Liberty, and Independence”
Some smart business developers and politicians in Pennsylvania have approached the top suits of several of the biggest buy-side firms in an effort to appeal to their prudent side and their desire to prevent downtime in the event of any catastrophic events that may cripple NYC’s financial infrastructure:
Declaring “we’ve got your back,” Pennsylvania officials and a developer Tuesday sought to coax executives from major Wall Street companies to establish backup operations in the northeastern part of the state as a way to safeguard their operations against terrorists.
Three helicopters whisked executives from Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., Morgan Stanley and others companies from Manhattan to a resort in the Poconos. There they dined on filet and lobster and listened to a pitch for “Wall Street West,” an ambitious effort to build millions of square feet of office space and install hundreds of miles of fiber-optic cable in as many as nine Pennsylvania counties.
Managing risk is the essence of the financial industry. And what seemingly bigger risk is there than another terrorist strike? My only concern regarding this strategy is that any solution such as this can’t simply fall back on yet another easily targeted epicenter of technical infrastructure. It’s not immediately clear how this would be addressed and how the backup systems would be protected, but it’s worth noting that the efforts do have the backing of Washington:
The state also is expected to award a contract in November for the installation of hundreds of miles of fiber-optic cable from New York to Pennsylvania, a process that could take a year to 18 months. Meanwhile, the U.S. Labor Department has awarded a $15 million grant to the Wall Street West initiative for work force training.
There are lots of funny cracks I could make about politics and business, but this is a serious issue that effects the nation’s economic strength as well as the world at large. This is a good issue to watch and I hope that the solution for the long term is more robust than having one monolithic backup center in the Keystone state, and that is no knock on Pennsylvania, but a nod to the notion that a decentralized backup infrastructure is a better defense than one that is centralized. After all, if terrorists can penetrate the well funded defenses of 21st century NYC, how hard is it going to be to distrupt a single secondary location?
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