Portland

When an explosion last June knocked out 9,000 servers at The Planet, a Texas data center, 7,500 customers were affected. Though this level of disruption is rare, it provides a sobering reminder of how reliant businesses are on high tech, and if that technology suddenly fails how fast it can sink a business.

Prevention and disaster planning are key, say experts, to surviving a crash and keeping costs down over the long haul.

Need some last-minute travel information? A growing number of airports are sending messages and alerts to e-mail, BlackBerry and cell phone users.

Travelers need to sign up, but the service transmits information about flights, parking, ground traffic or security waiting times electronically for free. It's also available at many airports' Web sites.