Five years after 9/11 you would think that people would have located business continuity ops much further away (assuming the businesses are based in NYC) than NJ.
The financial industry has to have their NY backups somewhere else in the NY area because they generally require proximity to the NYSE. The latency from the NYSE to their office is more important than anything else. Also, there are many other stock markets outside New York in London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, etc. There are also ECNs which are electronic trading networks that are not reliant on a single physical location. There is redundancy at all layers. The NYSE has its own redundancy, all the brokerage firms have their redundancy, the banks have theirs, the clearing companies have theirs, and so on. Even within a single organization they likely have different backup locations for servers, for data backups, for office space, etc. Lots of people have been working on this for quite a few years now and they generally hedge their bets by offsetting the high risk backup location in Jersey City with some lower risk backup sites further away. It's all about risk management, a world in which there are few absolutes. --Michael Dillon