Business continuity: It is not possible to guard against every risk

it is not acceptable if you are not up and running.” It may not be easy, or even possible, to roll back to previous ways of working if a systems failure or disaster strikes an offshore or outsourced business service. “Especially with complex, distributed environments, where services and data are spread around the world, organisations are having to take business continuity that much more seriously,” adds Stanton.

Fortunately for CIOs, some of the technologies that can reduce risk by keeping key services up and running have become simpler and less costly to implement in the past few years. Data protection technologies such as real-time replication, snapshotting — which allows companies to capture the data from a system at a specific moment without taking applications off line — and a move from tape to disc for a growing range of back-up tasks have all contributed to improvements in data availability, especially for larger organizations. “There are more technologies that allow organizations to achieve four or five nines [99.999 per cent] availability,” says CA’s Luff. “But budgets will always determine the scope of business continuity arrangements.” For small and mid-sized enterprises, falling costs of disc storage, especially systems based around RAID (redundant array of independent disks) technology and storage area networks have improved data availability, as has the growth of remote back-ups to online “data vaults” (see Liverpool FC: Football club’s solid defense). “SMEs and some larger companies are looking at electronic vaulting,” says John Bennett, worldwide director for data center transformation solutions at Hewlett-Packard. “Mid-range and large companies are looking at mirroring and replication, along with virtualization in the data center for faster recovery of IT systems.” Technology developments, he adds, are now providing real alternatives to building an expensive, second data center.

Even the best-prepared IT department, however, cannot guard against every possible technical failure — and businesses will face problems that neither stem from, nor can be solved, by IT. The first point is illustrated by the experience of two clients of Accenture, the technology consultancy. One client, a Wall Street investment bank, fell victim to a corrupt main database and came close to being unable to trade. Another, a national retailer, lost its connections to its point of sale computers and was unable to process any sales. In the case of the Wall Street bank, the fault was eventually traced to a bug in anti-virus software,