From the highest technology solutions against cyber crime, to the low-technology sandbags that saved $4 billion of Goldman Sachs’ New York City and Jersey City buildings against Superstorm Sandy, to the far-reaching and thought-provoking keynote presentation by Roland Cloutier, Vice President & Chief Security Officer of ADP, the Security 500 Conference gathered security’s thought leaders for a day of provoking and valuable networking.
Victimized by Superstorm Sandy itself in November and rescheduled to February 12, it is no surprise that the first panel focused on business resilience and lessons learned from Sandy. At the heart of successful resilience programs was strong communication with employees and stakeholders, redundancy against failures and moving into action well before the storm arrived. Panelists Ken Damstrom of Goldman Sachs, Daniel Holmes of Honeywell and Ed Goetz of Exelon shared their biggest lessons from the experience, especially the underestimation of the effect the storm would have on their employees’ families and homes, making the employees unavailable or unable to come to work as scheduled. As a result, resiliency plans have already been updated to include the housing and support of family members.