I recently heard some first-hand observations of agents who were victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita last summer, and it gave me food for thought. Some agents experienced property damage and loss of data they hadn't anticipated, as 30-foot storm surges sent waves as far as six miles inland. One vendor noted that many of its agency customers kept their back-up data offsite but only a few miles from their main offices, and both locations sustained hurricane damage. As a result, those agencies lost valuable data and had difficulty resuming their normal operations, despite having taken precautions to prevent just such an occurrence. So, how can agencies learn from this experience and prevent similar woes in the future?

One insurance company I know used the U.S. Postal Service as a mobile repository for its data back-up tapes. Each morning someone mailed the previous night's tapes to someone else in a distant city, who then mailed them back to the home office. The full cycle took about one week and seemed to be a secure, reliable and effective way to protect tapes from the elements. If you can work out a similar arrangement with a friend or family member in a distant location, this model might work for you too.

If you have multiple agency locations, another solution may be close at hand. Multiple offices can be electronically linked with a secure Internet connection called a virtual private network that acts like a personal data pipeline. A VPN provides seamless access to customer data at any of an agency's locations by storing copies of the data at all of them. For example, when a document is created at the agency's primary location, a copy is immediately sent to a second location using software such as Suresync. In effect, information at each location is continuously backed up to another of the agency's sites. The agency management system also can be backed up to another location using the VPN, minimizing the chance of data loss should a disaster befall one of the agency's offices.