In late August, before Hurricane Katrina roared through the Gulf Coast, flooding 80% of New Orleans and causing one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history, it landed in South Florida. In its path was AlphaStaff Inc., a midmarket provider of benefits and payroll services, whose Boca Raton headquarters were forced to close for 24 hours.

AlphaStaff had been through this upheaval before. Hurricanes shut it down four times last year. Each storm knocked out the e-mail system customers used to send payroll and other critical information to AlphaStaff. After the fourth hurricane, CIO Ralph Labara and Director of IT Jack Rahner decided to get serious about business continuity. "Last year was really the eye opener," Rahner says, about the need for a more comprehensive approach.

With Katrina, AlphaStaff was ready. Last year, it developed a business continuity plan that includes using the OneSwitch for Exchange service from MessageOne Inc., a business continuity software and services vendor in Austin, Texas. When AlphaStaff closed its offices, the OneSwitch service automatically replicated critical data from AlphaStaff's Exchange servers to MessageOne's remote servers, providing both failover and failback for its Exchange e-mail and keeping vital e-mail access operating for AlphaStaff's customers. (Failover occurs when a secondary server takes over after a primary server has failed; when the primary server comes back online, the failback capability kicks in, relieving the secondary server of its duties.)