Traditionally businesses thought in terms of disaster recovery when considering how to restore centralized data centres in the event of natural or man-made catastrophes; the emphasis was on backup of data off-site, and planning was in terms of how many hours or days it would take to recover. This disaster recovery mindset has been replaced by a continuous operations approach, in which businesses must be able to maintain core business processes continuously, before, during and after catastrophe strikes.

The shift to continuous operations has been driven by two major developments over the last 10 years which mean that the data centre approach to business IT of the 1980s, in which computing was something in the background which provided information to help people doing the business, has been replaced by a paradigm in which business cannot function without IT. The first development has been the growth of enterprise resource planning, supply chain management and customer relationship management, which have combined to create an environment in which businesses can no longer function without access to the applications and data run on these systems. The second major development driving the shift to continuous operations is e-business: companies selling on the Web must be operational 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There are already well-publicized examples of revenue losses in millions of dollars from real-time systems failures.

The implementation of continuous operations is critical for most businesses, but must be considered carefully. Ensuring continuity is an expensive business and should be applied on a targeted basis: any company that implements a single business continuity strategy across the organization will either be spending money unnecessarily or failing to provide the needed levels of continuity for the truly critical processes. IBM has identified a logical approach to implementing business continuity. First, identify the business processes that are crucial for competing in that business area; next identify all the capabilities (skills, knowledge, physical facilities and IT) needed to perform those critical business processes. Finally, analyse the risks associated with these capabilities and determine how to manage them. Options for managing those risks will be to accept, mitigate or transfer, depending on how critical the capability and risk is.

Critical success factors in ensuring continuous operations include rapid fail-over facilities housed and powered separately from the main production equipment, access to a pool of skilled support staff, effective use of techniques such as database and disk mirroring and electronic journaling, and ensuring suppliers are able to replace physical assets quickly in the event of a facility-wide incident. Riding above all these however, is the need for the business to recognize that continuous operations has become a critical business, not purely IT, issue and must be managed by all executives, managers and employees - not just by the IT manager.