The remote data center will be located either in Atlanta or Dallas, according to Mayo. Keesler also plans to replicate data to that facility and to two locations in the Gulf Coast region, he said. Work on the replication project began in May.

Officials at Intralox LLC, a maker of modular plastic conveyor belts in Harahan, La., thought it was well prepared for a disaster before Katrina struck. But they quickly "learned we had a lot of other things to do," said Stuart Smolkin, the company's marketing strategy manager.

Now Intralox has set up a satellite assembly facility in Dallas and identified workers who will go there if another major storm threatens the New Orleans area. The company also has located a customer service group in Dallas to take orders. In addition, it has installed redundant hardware and software there and set up a fail-over system for routing phone calls to Dallas. "If we had to leave here, in a matter of hours we'd have all our major systems running," Smolkin said.

The day before Katrina came ashore, the IT staff at Tidewater Inc. drove two SUVs packed with an IBM AS/400 and Compaq servers from New Orleans to Houston, where the company had an office with high-speed Internet access in place. Tidewater had already made plans to have its IP addresses automatically fail over, and the relocated servers were up within 54 hours.

But that wasn't good enough for John Chaffee, IT director at Tidewater, which provides supply vessels and marine support services to the offshore energy industry.