Getting Started with Business Continuity on IBM Z

IBM Z® platforms underpin mission-critical enterprise workloads where disruptions directly affect availability, data integrity, and business outcomes. Business continuity (BC) is achieved through designed resiliency and recovery that uses platform capabilities to contain failures, preserve service, and help ensure predictable outcomes.

Resiliency sustains service during disruption by isolating faults, eliminating single points of failure (SPOFs), and enabling graceful degradation. Recovery restores service after disruption through deterministic, automated processes that are aligned to defined recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). Together, they deliver consistent availability, reduced downtime, and rapid restoration across IBM Z environments.

Disruption is inevitable. Systems fail, workloads evolve, infrastructure requires maintenance, and threats continue to emerge. The real measure of success is not avoiding disruption, but helping ensure controlled behavior under stress and fast, reliable recovery.

This IBM Redbooks® publication examines resiliency on the IBM Z platform, focusing on system behavior under failure and the architectural choices that drive availability and recovery. It introduces deployment patterns ranging from restart-based recovery to multi-site continuity, providing a practical framework for aligning business requirements with design.

The publication highlights enabling capabilities across the IBM Z stack, including infrastructure, IBM z/OS®, middleware, applications, and operations, with emphasis on automation, observability, and AI-assisted predictive operations.

BC depends on predictable behavior under stress and reliable restoration after stress. This publication helps you design and operate IBM Z environments to achieve that outcome.

This publication is intended for IT leaders, enterprise architects, infrastructure architects, system programmers, system operations professionals, BC planners, DR specialists, resiliency architects, site reliability engineers (SREs), and technical decision-makers who are responsible for designing, operating, and governing HA, recoverable, and resilient IBM Z environments.