How secure is your data? After the initial shock of September 11, many companies began to look at their own disaster preparedness, both of their facilities and their corporate data.

"We've seen a lot of companies looking into the debilitating nature of loss of information in the face of disaster," says Harry Kasparian, CEO of Burlington, Mass.-based Corporate Technologies, Inc. "They are asking what they can do if their data center goes down."

The concern is not limited to terrorist attacks. Fires, floods and other natural disasters, as well as systems failure, all put corporate information at risk.

"Corporate data is one of the greatest assets a company has," says Kasparian. "Companies are realizing they need to review their redundancy and disaster recovery preparedness."

To secure the data, Kasparian suggests a storage area network which links multiple hosts and storage resources.

"[SANs] enable disaster recovery by duplicating the corporate systems at another site," says Kasparian.

He says simply backing up information on a hard drive or tape drive is not enough. SANs provide redundancy as well as disaster recovery.

Recall Corp. president Al Trujillo says it is necessary to protect and manage corporate data through its entire life cycle.

"Data needs to be stored in secure and efficient facilities and destroyed at the end of its lifecycle," says Trujillo. "Data can still be dangerous even after it is no longer useful to the company."

He says Recall offers regularly scheduled tape backups which are held in a secure vault.

"Redundancy and mirrored systems provide a certain level of protection, but a virus could affect the whole system," he says. "Secure storage offers the ability to go back in time."

He says tape backup is less costly than maintaining redundant systems.

"Unfortunately most paper documents are not backed up," Trujillo adds. "If these are destroyed, a tremendous value will be lost."

He suggests an integrated document solution. Simply scan all important documents and there will be a secure electronic copy.