But there's more to be done. Although Ochsner has a disaster recovery hot site in place for its mainframe, Witherspoon said the foundation needs a recovery plan for its Lawson ERP applications and its electronic medical records system. The IT staff has begun a project to replicate the medical records to a data center in Baton Rouge, but that isn't scheduled to be finished until the end of the summer.

"Katrina was the hundred-year storm," Witherspoon said. "We'd all feel much more comfortable if some of this was in place right now because of the fragility of the hurricane protection here in New Orleans. But we're crossing our fingers and hoping this isn't the second hundred years."

That isn't a sure bet, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In a report released in late May, NOAA said there is an 80 percent chance that this year's hurricane season will be another above-normal one. The agency predicted that there will be between 13 and 16 named storms this season, with four to six of them developing into major hurricanes.

Keesler Federal Credit Union in Biloxi, Miss., will complete a project to install satellite communications technology at its 14 U.S. locations by the end of June, said Larry Mayo, Keesler's vice president of information technologies. The credit union also has deployed a converged data and voice network that will be able to work over the satellite links.

However, the new setup couldn't handle all of Keesler's voice traffic if local telecommunications service went down again, Mayo said. "We're making a trade-off until we get our redundant data center outside the Gulf Coast built," he said, adding that the processing of voice and data traffic will be collocated at the new facility.