DISASTER RECOVERY 
JOURNAL

P. O. Box 510110
St. Louis, MO 63151
(314) 894-0276 
Fax: (314) 894-7474
Internet www.drj.com 
E-mail drj@drj.com

EXECUTIVE PUBLISHER
Richard L. Arnold, CBCP
richard@drj.com

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Jon Seals
jon@drj.com

SENIOR EDITOR
Janette Ballman
janette@drj.com

ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Ed Pearce, CBCP
ed@drj.com

ASSISTANT EDITOR
Pamela Clifton
pamelaclifton@hotmail.com

COPY EDITORS
Jim Hammill, CBCP
Richard Sandhofer
richards@drj.com

ADVERTISING 
Robert Arnold
bob@drj.com

_____________

Corporate

President/CEO
Richard L. Arnold, CBCP
richard@drj.com

Vice President 
Robert Arnold
bob@drj.com

CONFERENCE COORDINATOR
Patti Fitzgerald, CBCP
patti@drj.com

CONFERENCE REGISTRAR
Merce Knese
mercedes@drj.com

CIRCULATION
Laura Baugh
laurab@drj.com

EXECUTIVE COUNCIL
Mike Croy, Forsythe
Jeff Dato, MBCP, KPMG
John Jackson
Edward S. Devlin, E.S. Devlin & Associates
James Hammill, CBCP, JMH Consulting Inc.
Pat McAnally, SunGard Availability Services
Brian Turley, Strohl Systems
Belinda Wilson, Hewlett-Packard


INTERNATIONAL
CONTACTS
England: Thom Hetherington
Business Continuity
Phone: 0161-237-1007
thomh@tempus.demon.co.uk
Japan: Shinji Hosotsubo
Crisis Management and Preparedness Organization
Phone: 03-3519-6270
fax: 03-3519-6255
hosotsubo@cmpo.org
Brazil: José Carlos Ferreira
Disaster Recovery Mercosul
Phone and fax: 011-3666-9506
jocaff@uol.com.br

Click Here for a Printable Version

An Interview With Pat Gambaro
of the New York Board of Trade

By JASON FRADIN

Pat Gambaro is executive vice president of operations for the New York Board of Trade (NYBOT). NYBOT is New York’s first futures exchange, where the world trades food, fiber, and financial products. For more than a century, NYBOT has provided reliability, integrity, and security in a global marketplace for cocoa, coffee, cotton, ethanol, orange juice, pulp, and sugar, as well as currency and index futures and options.

Fradin: What’s the most important issue for NYBOT in terms of information availability?
Gambaro: For us, information availability involves not only the plan itself, but also having all of our applications covered in the process — from internal applications, to cyberspace, and so forth. The primary concern is to ensure that our business will continue, at all levels, regardless of the type of interruption — from a utility issue to a brownout to a dirty bomb. No matter what the scenario might be, we have to be ready.
Positioning ourselves for no single points of failure is an ongoing process, and both our membership and board of governors are confident that, even in the case of another scenario on the scale of the 9/11 attacks, we’ve put ourselves into the best position possible to continue operations. Our ultimate goal is 24/7 availability.

Fradin: Have your goals been shaped more by internal or external events?
Gambaro: They’re both significant factors. In the early 1990s, we had a coldsite with some business continuity planning and no trading floor capabilities. We were located in the World Trade Center, and after the 1993 bombing, we sought a more comprehensive approach, putting hotsite and alternate facilities in place. We learned a lot from our experiences during 9/11 as well. In fact, when we reopened on 9/17, we were the first exchange to be back in operation. It’s important to be confident in the people assisting you; having the right relationships is key.
Today, we have a totally dedicated solution, including two trading facilities as well as separate datacenters. Our processors are in two different locations, and we’re dealing with servers now, versus mainframes, so we place great emphasis on ensuring that our Net environment is solid. Regulatory and security issues are other emerging factors. We’re well aware that even though Sarbanes-Oxley doesn’t affect us greatly right now from a corporate standpoint, it could in the future.

Fradin: NYBOT set an all-time annual trading record in 2004, processing more than 31 million combined futures and options contracts. How has your approach evolved as the volume has grown?
Gambaro: It requires more balance. We’ve experienced record growth: in just two years, our volume has increased by nearly 60 percent. One of our ongoing objectives is to find new ways to maintain efficiency in this type of environment, and we can’t afford to be frugal. This means an even tighter focus on the changing needs of our end-users.
For example, we’ve implemented a new platform called eCOPS [electronic Commodity Operations Processing System] that enables us to track the movement of any given product, from its initial inception through to the end user. We’ve been widely applauded for the eCOPS platform, including positive comments from the Department of Homeland Security. This type of capability allows us to deal with a wide constituency — from the farmers and the shippers, to the warehouse, the product graders, the customers, and the product users, as well as the banks and insurance companies. We need to ensure continuous availability of information across all levels.

Fradin: Does the expanded constituency lead to different work requirements or a more fundamental shift in the role of the IT department?
Gambaro: Ultimately, it’s a shift to where the potential impact of IT on bottom-line revenue becomes an upfront consideration. Operations and IT have not traditionally been viewed as revenue-producing functions for most organizations, but I believe that’s changing. A major outage would not only incur lost revenues for the exchange, but also create a ripple effect throughout the industry we serve. Any system outage could disallow product acquisition, hinder trade position elimination, and greatly impact the bottom line of all associate organizations.
To use an extreme example, after a recent discovery process, we found that if our operations were to be down for a week, the extended effect on the industry could amount to $5 million per day in lost business. As we deal with a widened constituency, it’s our job to ensure that this doesn’t happen. That’s another reason tightly integrated availability is so critical.

Fradin: How do you ensure that your objectives are on the right track?
Gambaro: For our operations team, user groups are very important. We regularly convene a 30-person operations and technology user group that encompasses all facets of the industry. It’s also of the utmost importance to surround ourselves with top industry and internal staff people, and to have the right partnerships in place. Together we maintain an extremely stable NYBOT environment, and work to ensure that the industry we serve continues to prosper.

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