Bangalore: In IT, failure is not an option. Steve Schlet, CEO of clothing maker Duluth Trading Co expressing his disconcern says that "In the corporate world, failure is an F word, and you just don't talk about it." The fear of failure has compelled organizations to prioritize on developing and implementing reliable business continuity plans to ensure that IT services are always available to internal users and outside customers.

Some of the technologies such as cloud computing, virtualization, social networks and usage of mobile devices in workforce have impacted the IT world, in a better way say experts. But at the same time these tech trends also bring along some new challenges with them.

Take a look at how these tech megatrends are affecting IT business continuity specifically.

Virtualization

Virtualization basically removes the physical constraints of IT infrastructure and resources by offering remote services and computing power and hence makes the business continuity planning much more easier for IT executives by reducing the number of IT assets reports Bob Violino in InfoWorld.

George Muller, VP, sales planning, supply chain & IT at Imperial Sugar Co, America’s largest processors and marketers of refined sugar says that "For those of us who have been in the IT world for a few years, we've seen the transition from the old large mainframes to client server to Web-based applications to cloud based computing," Muller says. "During that time the proliferation of PCs and servers has been wild."

Muller says that with huge number of devices to maintain and run efficiently at sametime, especially physical servers in the data center, the biggest challenge here was ensuring systems uptime. "With virtualization, we've now been able to reduce that footprint [of servers], which means when we are planning for business continuity now we've got fewer devices to worry about."