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business continuity.
Business continuity involves several diverse aspects that at first may seem unrelated. Are your files backed up? Where do you store your data? Do you have any service agreements in place should your server or workstation malfunction? What do you do if the administrator for your system should call in sick or, worse, die? Do you have the means in your computer area to put out a fire? These and many other questions deal with the issue of how to prevent your business from collapsing in case of catastrophic failure.
Failures needn't be catastrophic, that is, on the scale of Hurricane Katrina, to bring a business to a halt. Whereas a hard drive malfunction appears at first to be a small event, if your entire business's database was stored on that hard drive, you might find yourself out of business. An administrator out with influenza may not be such a terrible thing, unless she is the only one with the passwords to a critical system. Broken water pipes, power spikes, someone tipping coffee into a server, a computer virus and other small incidences can have major impacts on your business.
Preventing such circumstances also plays a role in business continuity. Your server may be new and your hard drives are redundant, but nothing short of a lock and key will prevent someone from walking in and taking both of these away. Having an expensive halon system in place to put out fires will do you no good if there is no halon in the system to begin with. When was your last test? You might well back up your systems, but backups will do nothing for you if they are on site when a wall of water or a tornado comes through.
No amount of planning is foolproof, but having no plan at all is foolhardy. Viruses, fires, hardware failures and human error are all a part of risk taken when developing a system or a network of systems. Do you have a plan in place?
Websites
Business continuity is a fairly large topic covering disaster recovery planning, risk analysis, testing and maintenance, and more. Below are a number of websites you may find useful in developing your own business continuity plan.
General Resources
The Diasater Recovery Planning Guide
Business Continuity Planning at the Wikipedia
Business Continuity Planning from Britain's MI5
MIT's Business Continuity Public Plan