Most IT executives don’t have a whole lot of confidence in their company’s business continuity strategies. The reason for this lack of confidence isn’t necessarily based on a lack of will, but rather on a lack of budget.

Though IT organizations generally have enough funding to support their ongoing IT operations, they typically run short of funding when it comes to buying the secondary infrastructure required to deploy a robust business continuity plan. As a result, most IT organizations have no real business continuity plan in place—or else they have a plan to support key assets that’s tenuous at best.

This situation exists primarily because the vendor community has always viewed business continuity as an opportunity to sell additional products. In effect, vendors are using the fact that IT products can fail as an excuse to sell additional products to their customers.

The question is, Does it really have to be this way? The answer is, No. A number of products have recently come to market that not only distribute workloads across multiple devices, but also automatically pick up for each other if one of the products fails.

For example, the Oklahoma division of 7-Eleven manages the IT infrastructure for 100 stores from its Oklahoma City facility. The division is in the process of deploying wireless access points across these 100 stores as part of an effort to improve its inventory control system. But instead of choosing one of the better-known providers of wireless access points, the company opted for Aerohive’s wireless access points, which are mutually supporting in the event of failure.

According to Mike McTice, a senior systems programmer and integrator at the company, this means that if an access point were to fail, 7-Eleven would not have to immediately dispatch someone to fix it. More importantly, the company would not have to pay for additional wireless access points just to serve as a back up.