The problem: What could be safer than shipping your backup tapes to an offsite storage firm? That's what Time Warner (the corporate parent of Business 2.0 magazine) thought until an offsite data-security vendor lost a tape containing the names and Social Security numbers of 600,000 current and former employees. Backup tapes routinely disappear in transit - when they're not stolen outright from corporate offices.

The solution: Encrypt sensitive data before sending it off to storage. To avoid having something "fall off the truck," transmit encrypted backups electronically, over a virtual-private-network link, to an offsite data center.