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Gone are the days when a comprehensive business-continuity plan meant mailing back-up tapes to a hot site a few miles away. Today, businesses are always on, running at break-neck speed 24/7. And their business-continuity plans need to reflect that reality.

"If we're not getting data from our customers, we can't run our business," says Jeff Flanigan, director of IT infrastructure at E-gatematrix, an Atlanta company that tracks and stocks meals, headsets, blankets and other service items for major airlines around the world. "There are airplanes in the sky 24/7, and we're always either loading aircraft or getting ready for aircraft to come in. It's a nonstop process. We can't be down, and our disaster-recovery plans have to take that into account."

Fortunately, new data center technologies, such as business process monitoring, continuous data protection and virtualization , are emerging to make recovering such environments easier and more cost-effective. Experts and users who have built successful business-continuity plans offer the following best practices for business continuity in the era of the new data center.

1. Tier applications by criticality. Today's organizations are becoming increasingly data-intensive and, as a result, the amount of data they potentially need to recover quickly can become overwhelming. "Up until now, many companies aimed to recover absolutely everything in one fell swoop," says Michael Croy, director of business-continuity solutions at Forsythe Technology, an IT consultancy. "But that's just not feasible anymore because most organizations have too much data, too many applications and too many interdependent processes."

The solution is to take a holistic view of the business and bring back only the most critical applications right away. "It is not always feasible to bring everything back straightaway," says Penny Turnbull, senior director for crisis management and business-continuity planning at Marriott International, in Washington, D.C. "If you don't need certain things immediately, you can be wasting time, effort and money planning for their recovery. And that's what business-continuity planning is all about: Knowing the must-haves, because you can't recover everything."