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Computerworld - Business continuity strategies are about responding to and recovering from natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and terrorist strikes such as the Sept. 11 attacks, right? After all, it's these large-scale disasters that shut down data centers, making it impossible for an enterprise to operate until critical IT and other systems are restored.
If this philosophy underpins your business continuity and disaster preparedness plans, then it's time for a reality check. Here's the reality: Industry analysts have said that up to 80% of all unplanned downtime is the result of software problems or human error. For example, human errors have contributed to power outages, which can disrupt businesses. However, companies can increase their ability to ensure business continuity with the right business processes and systems management and automation software.
Here's another reality: Industry experts have estimated that up to 70% of the time it takes to recover is think time; that is, the time required to figure out what's wrong and what steps to take -- and the order in which to take them -- to recover in the fastest time possible.
The magnitude of hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, terrorist attacks and the like make planning for them an essential part of any effective business continuity strategy. Today, however, business continuity is about much more than preparing for and recovering from major disasters. It's also about addressing everyday issues that can add up to a major disaster rather than business success. Here are a few examples:

• A retailer's point-of-sale application goes down, and customers leave the stores without completing their purchases.


• The performance of an e-commerce Web site degrades, and frustrated customers click over to a competitor's site.


• A bank customer on his way to a car dealership can't get into his bank's loan system and goes to another bank's Web site to finance his new automobile.


• Human error causes corrupted data to be replicated throughout the storage environment, and key applications continue chugging away using bad data.

These small disasters translate into a few lost customers here, a few lost sales there and, ultimately, into lower revenues, lower profits and lower shareholder value.
New rules, new risks
Twenty-five years ago, business continuity was about backing up mainframe data, storing backups off-site and ensuring that the appropriate hardware and software would be available at a remote location in case a disaster knocked out the data center. Computer systems could be taken off-line at night for batch processing, backups and other maintenance tasks because most of the computer users were home asleep.
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