Gay said Blue Cross also is moving to reduce its reliance on tape backups by using tools from Double-Take Software in Southboro, Mass., to mirror its servers to an unspecified hot-site facility, with backup copies kept in the insurer's own data center. "Shipping tapes concerns us," he said, citing the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act's data privacy regulations, as well as the need to access information in the event of a major storm or other disaster.

Stopgap measures

Like Blue Cross, the office of the clerk of the circuit court for Florida's Hillsborough County is working to upgrade its data backup capabilities. Jeanne Harden, project manager for computer operations in the clerk's office, said that after seeing the damage caused by Katrina, she realized that neither a data center in downtown Tampa nor a second facility 11 miles from the coast would be safe if a similar storm struck.

"We don't feel comfortable at all," Harden said. "If this area gets hit by a Katrina, both my data centers are potentially gone, and there goes my data."

The clerk's office had stopped doing tape backups in favor of backing up information disk-to-disk between systems at the two data centers. But last week, it resumed weekly backups to tapes that will be shipped out of state. Harden said that's just a stop-gap measure while she talks with remote hosting vendors about doing electronic backups to an out-of-state facility -- a capability that she hopes to have in place by next month.