IT managers have been—or soon will be—tasked to find ways to eliminate or reduce the adverse impact of downtime on the business. Recent events have shown that disaster recovery plans and data replication alone are often not enough. This white paper provides a basic understanding of the building blocks of IT and business continuity—from understanding the concepts of disaster recovery and information availability to calculating the business impact of downtime and selecting the right software solution. Readers will be able to quickly match their specific optimum uptime objectives with the easiest and most cost-effective IT strategy.