To ensure the rapidly growing outfit doesn’t skip a beat, production applications get replicated every night in the company’s disaster recovery center, which is about 20 miles from headquarters. Replicating makes restarting after power outages or other network troubles a snap. It also ensures that no data is lost and that the most up-to-date versions of data and applications are stored.

Earthquakes are a particular concern for Steve Davidek, operations and systems administrator for the city of Sparks, Nev. “We think citizens and families first,” says Davidek. “So our biggest continuity issue is making certain our police and fire dispatch systems are protected.” To that end, the city virtualized its data systems by putting them on a storage area network (SAN) this past January. The city can switch over to the SAN automatically if its emergency systems go down. With the police and fire dispatch systems on the SAN, dispatchers will never lose touch with vital name, address and telephone number data that police and fire departments need for responding to calls.

3. Implement a multi-modal communication system. When the BlackBerry messaging system went dark for 12 hours this past April, many companies were left figuratively bumping into furniture and groping for a light switch. A business functioning primarily on one communication mechanism (such as the BlackBerry) should consider implementing a multi-modal communication system for redundancy and continuity’s sake, as Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey did.

Fairleigh Dickinson’s multi-modal communication system enables the university to notify its 12,000 students and staff by e-mail, text message, voice messages or a combination of those methods about snow days, flooding, major schedule changes and emergency campus information. “We realized that not all of our system users check e-mail constantly or consistently, so we needed a system that could broadcast to e-mail, cell phones or home phones,” says Neal Sturm, CIO at Fairleigh Dickinson. “We had to plan for ways to be absolutely certain to get messages out if a disaster struck.”

A strong communications backbone is critical when dealing with unexpected events. Your continuity plan should include a private IP network for communications, according to Forrester Research. If this seems like overkill to you, your CEO or CFO, consider what might happen in a health pandemic during which your company’s regional or national workforce is forced to stay home: To remain productive, they need to be able to access business systems on the corporate network from home, which would require your company to have a private IP network, VPN connectivity or some other type of dedicated Internet service. With such technology in place, employees can continue to work, and executives can continue to engage in high-level daily discussions and decision-making about business operations.