Recovery Efforts Making Progress In Washington

SRA International, Fairfax, Va., worked from the ground up to bring a U.S. Navy command center and several other clients back online. The physical plant and all equipment at the Navy facility, located at the site of the jet crash, "had been completely destroyed," said Tim Atkin, director of SRA's critical infrastructure protection program.

SRA essentially recreated the systems and infrastructure in place at the Navy center before the disaster, Atkin said. The project included procuring new hardware and software to rebuilding a network to developing a videoconferencing application.

Since the attack, some IT areas have garnered more attention, Atkin added. Among SRA's clients, there has been "an enhanced emphasis on disaster-recovery planning and increased [system redundancy," he said.

Such contingency planning has always been addressed and was something "that people had taken seriously for a long time," Atkin said. But plans for mirrored sites, backup servers and other recovery measures hadn't always been implemented. "Senior managers are [now fully engaged in thinking about these issues," he said.

KPMG Consulting also is working with the Department of Defense in the aftermath of the Pentagon attack. In the past six months, "there has been a shift in focus to national and physical security vs. pure technology acquisition," said Jim Geiger, senior vice president of KPMG's federal services practice.

What's more, new federal agencies are putting additional demands on integrators, Geiger said. "We are helping them pull together an information technology architecture," including systems for identity verification and evaluation of security-focused applications, he said. Over the next six to nine months, more government contracts are likely to be awarded to solution providers for beefing up security, disaster-recovery and related systems, he added.