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For IT directors, non-stop computing means non-stop pressure: pressure to keep systems up and running, pressure to ensure that they are seamlessly integrated with each other, pressure to be able to allocate a limited pool of computing resources to different applications as and when they are needed.

Non-stop computing is a recurring theme in this month's Information Age. Our cover feature, Disaster zone, looks at how IT departments are organising their disaster recovery and business continuity strategies in the light of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

In continuity terms, a disaster on that scale is clearly the most extreme scenario imaginable – one technology executive related how a client company lost its entire business recovery team in the World Trade Center disaster. However, the evidence we have gathered suggests that many organisations are still unprepared to meet the challenge of more commonplace disasters such as fire and flood – despite the fact that in a recent survey of UK IT managers conducted by business availability specialist Synstar, 25% of respondents said that they saw IT downtime as a threat to job security.

Non-stop computing is, of course, highly reliant on an organisation having a scalable and manageable server architecture. But today's server infrastructures are, according to analysts at IT market research company Forrester Research, a sprawling mess. IT departments, they say, have "piled racks of servers to the ceiling", and because each server runs an independent copy of an operating system and application package, each box requires individual management attention and is frequently under-utilised. "Today's server administrators feel like the hosts of a New Year's Eve blowout the morning after – overwhelmed by the mess and not sure where to start on the clean-up." One answer, say hardware companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Compaq, is the blade server – a server contained on a single motherboard, measuring around one and three-quarter inches wide. In the article Cutting edge?, we examine how blade servers – with their promise of squeezing as much computing power into as little floor space as possible – are likely to change corporate computing.

But non-stop computing is not just about server uptime. It is also about ensuring that disparate elements of the IT architecture can work together, sharing data, in support of higher-level business processes. For example, in the case of a customer order, an operator in a call centre might need to ask the enterprise resource planning system to check the inventory, the supply chain management system to check for delivery dates, and a financial system for a customer credit check. In Process puzzles, we takes a look at the burgeoning business process management (BPM) movement. By managing IT infrastructures along business process management lines, say proponents of the approach, organisations can build flexible, resilient, responsive systems at speed.

But clearly, business process management – just like establishing a watertight business continuity strategy or deciding on a new server architecture – involves a major shift in the way IT departments are run. In the pursuit of efficiency, the pressure never ends!