For example, Dave Muntz, CIO at Texas Health Resources Inc. in Arlington, has put his 335 IT staffers through disaster recovery drills for years. But after seeing the utter devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, Muntz added a new twist: He made the drills a surprise. Previously, the IT workers were given some warning that a test was coming.

The first unannounced test was conducted in April. Muntz said IT staffers received a message late one day telling them that the health care provider's systems were unavailable. For some, going into disaster recovery mode meant working all night and into a weekend. In addition, a small team was dispatched to SunGard Data Systems Inc.'s hot-site facility in Philadelphia, where they mounted tapes to restore the company's systems.

To add to the realism, Muntz timed the test to take place when the IT department was busy working on projects. "We do it at the most inopportune time to make sure we can test ourselves under great stress," he said. "We don't do it when everything is going smoothly."

Lessons were learned at the SunGard facility. For instance, a configuration problem arose when a highly available application that requires two CPUs was put on a machine with just one processor. "It wanted the other CPU to be available," Muntz said. "Those are the kinds of things that you can't learn except by doing."

Hurricane Katrina prompted Office Depot Inc. to take steps to improve its internal communications capabilities. Critical teams of workers are being equipped with laptops that have nationwide broadband cellular access, said Tom Serio, director of global business continuity at the Delray Beach, Fla.-based retailer.