Brian Young, the chief executive of security and provisioning software maker Thor Technologies, is still counting the company's blessings as it recovers from September 11th.

Housed on the 87th floor of One World Trade Center, all 42 of Thor's employees escaped the building after one of the two hijacked planes that destroyed the twin towers crashed a few floors above their office.

When the towers collapsed, the ten-year-old company lost $2.5 million worth of office infrastructure and 10,000 square feet of space.

Young and his management team lined up new a temporary office on Park Avenue in midtown within days. It's half the space they had before and averages out to twice what they paid, but business insurance is covering the difference and the company's client base is staying put.

Data recovery, however, is another story, even for a technology company that captures most of its information digitally and maintains hot back-ups at an offsite data center.

"We backed up all the data but not the applications," Young says. "We had a media safe (in the office) with copies of our applications. We believed the building would be safe. So we kept our data, had the back-up media, but didn't have anything to play it on."

Suppliers and vendors quickly replaced the company's computers and networking infrastructure. And Thor's developers are scrambling to re-write the programs that help the company create provisioning and access rights software for major enterprise clients.

All things considered, and compared to the thousands of financial companies, agencies and firms in the financial district who lost hundreds of employees, Young knows his company is poised to bounce back quickly because of what it can retrieve.

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For many financial services firms and legal firms especially impacted by the destruction of the World Trade Center, however, the digital data they retrieved is a trickle compared to the volume and value of paper records lost forever.

Now, in the reckoning of how to rebuild, a major re-thinking is underway among businesses about moving to electronic records, data recovery and how to protect the most precious capital: intellectual capacity.

"Ten to fifteen percent of businesses involved in the financial services industry have clients that still require a check payment," says Joseph Anastasio, managing partner with financial technology consulting firm Capco.

"And not only checks either, if anyone (housed in the WTC) was handling the underlying physical stock certificates for companies that individuals were invested with, those are gone."

When you think of the sheer size of the financial markets, 10 to 15 percent is still a lot of business saved on nothing but paper, he says. "We think that's a weak link in our system."

Anastasio headed operations at Salomon Brothers during his 22 years with the firm before it became part of Citigroup, and ran operations for JP Morgan's equity and derivative trading divisions during his 35 years on Wall Street.

He is among a group of experts urging the financial services industry and business community to not only adopt more electronic record-keeping, but to re-think where they house their employees and how they pipe their infrastructure. And it starts with the paper.

"What we're saying is this is a lesson about the vulnerability of paper which should wake us up. I think it's about time we caught up with technology. Markets that are far less prominent than US financial markets are totally electronic. They don't have certificates. They don't use checks. There's a lot of emotion around the shareholders' right to have a certificate. But evidence of ownership doesn't have to be in a risky piece of paper. We need to examine some of that tradition."

Anastasio says no one is suggesting doing away with investors' right of evidence of ownership, for example. "But when's the last time you saw someone using a passbook as evidence of the funds in a savings account?"

Data Back-up, Power Grids and Telecommunications Pathways

The talk is also aiming at smaller companies outside of the financial services industry that can't swing the prohibitive costs of maintaining redundant data systems. The buzzword there is cooperatives.

"They would work with other small firms and create a single contingency facility of which they would each share the cost. If an emergency strikes, each firm would contribute a percentage of staff to maintain the contingency facility for blocks of time," says Anastasio.

"But one of those conditions should be that the facility can't be in the firms' same location, power grid or communications grid."

Because of the extent of the human tragedy of the World Trade Center disaster, much of the talk among his colleagues is shifting in support of not housing whole divisions or firms in one building. "You have to think of the human assets, the kinds of skills that are clustered in once place. I think the whole country is aware of that now."

It's an idea that follows the discussion that firms should not be relying on one telecommunications carrier, as many in the area did when Verizon sustained heavy damage to its major voice and data cables at its 140 West Street office near the WTC.

As more firms displaced by the disaster scatter their employees in temporary locations while they search out new space in midtown or elsewhere, the Wall Street veteran knows that his thoughts on where to locate firms and employees aren't exactly what New York officials need to hear right now.

Current estimates from the loss of revenues are well over $100 billion and climbing, as more firms contemplate whether they want to relocate in Manhattan or elsewhere.

He and others in the industry want to see displaced companies stay in New York, just spread out a little more, such as midtown.

The costs can be managed, he adds, and they will have to be. Because "no matter how effectively the markets got back up, or how resilient the economy is, we have to make sure we're serious about the losses, why they were so severe, and that we don't forget."

Thor Technologies' employees certainly won't, adds Young. "Sometimes it feels like I'm a gerbil on a treadmill," he says of the process of restoring business systems and documents the employees lost on Sept. 11. But they're making progress.

"We're dealing with it, and at least we're not starting from scratch. And we're glad to be back to work."