Should one of the firm's Exchange, BlackBerry or Goodlink servers go down, the appliance takes over. And since Teneros monitors and maintains its appliances, there's little overhead for Adams' IT group.

While disaster planning needs to be high on your to-do list, that doesn't mean you've got to bust your budget. In Katrina's wake, Hancock "opened the checkbooks for DR," says Milliet. "But now, we want to rationalize our spending to be in line with business value."

One way to do that is to integrate disaster recovery needs with day-to-day operations, as Cubist did by optimizing its WAN.

On a larger scale, Hancock's management realized that having a single, centralized call center in hurricane country was courting disaster, so it opened a second. Score one for disaster recovery, and chalk up a win for customer service: The new facility reduces caller wait times for customers during normal operations.

Bill Snyder is a freelance writer based in California.