To this end, Phelps Dunbar also is working on building a second, redundant WAN. "MPLS will be our WAN A, and we're going to have a WAN B with as much redundancy as possible," he says. "We're trying to engineer this to have as few common elements as possible," which is difficult, considering the different geographical areas where the sites are situated. He says he's considering using multiple technologies, including metropolitan Ethernet and DSL.

Lockheed Martin also is looking to address some of the larger citywide infrastructure problems it encountered during Katrina. For example, the company had no electrical power or water services from the city for months. The plant had its own large power generators on-site and had fuel stores to keep them running for as long as 60 days. "We decided to rewire our server rooms and LAN rooms to put them on the generators and get them up and running, and that worked well," Stefancik says. "We were up well before power was restored."

Lockheed also dug its own 600-foot well to provide water for its air-conditioning and server room chillers, and that is still used. "Even today, we provide our employees with bottled water for drinking water," he says. "We have yet to get good clearance on our water here, almost 11 months after the storm."

Stefancik says another change Lockheed is considering is constructing its own cell tower on the company's 834-acre campus.

And he says his revamped disaster-recovery plan addresses the need for high-end processing. Employees now are required to take their laptops and the data on them home each night. "And we've acquired some high-end workstations that we will now set up at different locations if in fact a hurricane approaches, anywhere in the Gulf," he says.

Others are considering moving to new network technologies to make them more disasterproof. For example, Burgard says UNO is looking at moving to HP blade servers to reduce the amount of space and wiring needed in LSU's Baton Rouge data center. Currently, LSU is letting UNO use about four server racks of space, but Burgard is wary of depending on this for the future.

He says the school, which relies on Cisco for most of its network gear, is also considering a move to VoIP. "In the end, our own network was restored before BellSouth's," he says. "If we had VoIP, we would have been able to restore our voice communications. It's something we're looking into."

Similarly, Loyola has invested in a hosted solution for a distance-learning network. Before Katrina, the school had a small distance-learning initiative in place, but has since contracted it out to Blackboard to make sure that the service is hosted away from New Orleans and remains up and running.

"We'll use that to continue instruction, should we have to evacuate again," Jacobs says. "That's a change and investment for us. God forbid we have another Katrina, but we'll probably have evacuations of three or five days. And we want to make sure that the kids can continue to receive instruction and stay connected with the school."

Cummings is a freelance writer in Massachusetts, U.S. She can be reached at jocummings@comcast.net.