In view of the strategic dependency of many enterprises on the supporting IT services, the availability and functionality of these services is today vital to the business. Enterprises must therefore prepare for situations when services are massively disrupted and perhaps unavailable for a lengthy period. Modern IT service continuity management puts the emphasis on prevention. In coordination with the business, IT takes measures to reduce the probability and the impact of system failures. In an emergency case these help to re-establish the necessary IT infrastructure within the agreed time and maintain the services under these conditions.

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IT service continuity management focuses on those emergency cases which are regarded as significant enough by the business to develop into a disaster or a catastrophe. Less significant failures are handled as incidents in the incident management process. The decision on what is defined as a disaster varies from business to business. The consequences of a business service failure such as for example loss of sales or claims for compensation have to be determined in conjunction with the business as part of a business impact analysis, depending upon the downtime. The potential threats are identified on the basis of the known weaknesses and the risk analyzed. IT service continuity primarily covers the IT assets and configurations that support these business processes. In a disaster situation IT service continuity ensures the availability, within the stipulated period, of the measures and standby solutions defined for preventative purposes in accordance with the agreed business continuity strategy.