Related slideshow: Preparing for a Pandemic.

Business continuity is critical to delivering world-class service to your customers, so it’s important to understand the variety of approaches available. Whether you ultimately decide to employ cloud services or a remote hot site data center, understanding the implications of your decisions may be more important than the actual technologies you deploy.

Many IT managers and executives realize that providing continuous uptime is an ongoing process of improving systems and finding overlooked or new weak points in these systems. So let’s take a closer look at what’s involved, what steps managers have taken and the lessons they’ve learned.

Certainly, there is a lot more work to be done. Symantec’s fifth annual IT Disaster Recovery (DR) Research Report, released earlier this year, found that one-fourth of all failover tests to a recovery data center had some failures.

The good news is that the number of C-level executives involved in disaster planning (70 percent of the respondents) has doubled from last year’s DR survey. It’s difficult to tell whether that is because of the high costs of DR planning, the fact that more mission-critical applications are now part of DR plans that affect more potential customers, or just because CIOs are more aware of and attentive to business continuity.