Computer experts serving governments, colleges and hospitals in the Dayton area said they're surprised that the state would ask an intern to take home a backup tape of sensitive information as a standard security procedure.

"We were actually kind of dumbstruck that anyone would think that's the best way of protecting data," said Tom Skill, chief information officer for the University of Dayton.

The state practice came to light Friday after state officials announced a tape containing the names and Social Security numbers of 64,000 state employees and their dependents was stolen from the back seat of a car owned by a 22-year-old intern and parked at his apartment complex at the time.

UD, as well as the city and Montgomery County, hire specialized courier services to transport their backup tapes, via lock box, to off-site storage sites on a daily basis. The courier services never open the lock boxes. Only their clients hold the keys.

The cost of the daily service to UD is about $14,000 a year — a fraction of the university's annual $10 million budget for information technology services, Skill said.

Even the city of Kettering stores its tapes in an off-site vault. Only the city's manager of information technology is allowed to transport the tapes, said Assistant City Manager Al Fullenkamp.

Local institutions with large amounts of sensitive information also rely on encryption — a way of scrambling information so that only special machinery or software can decipher it according to a mathematical "key."

Premier Health Partners, which operates Miami Valley and Good Samaritan hospitals, encrypts all of its patient and financial data before storing its backup tapes at an off-site location, spokeswoman Nancy Thickel said.

The city of Dayton has a system that automatically encrypts and backs up its data at a second off-site server. In addition, the city uses a daily courier service to transport and store a set of backup tapes, said John Moore, the city's acting director of information technology services.

Skill said UD will move to an encryption back-up system by December.

Officials at the city of Kettering and Wright State University said they, too, were considering encryption of backup data.