That's how one CSO felt when his former employer asked him to create a formal program for a few years ago.

"It's hard, right?" says the CSO, who worked for a technology company at the time and asked to remain anonymous. "Any division could fall down, plants could fall down. Some divisions were good and some weren't. The top brass cared about the 20 percent that made 80 percent of the money and making sure that would continue if something happened."

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One division in particular that kept him up at night was the company's 10,000-employee Philippine operations. As the CSO saw it, this locale was highly vulnerable to at least four different kinds of potential disruptions: volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis and political unrest. And that's just for starters--it's ignoring the frequent outages and supply interruptions that characterize business in any less-developed country.

This CSO quickly realized that the heart of business continuity is ensuring that the company can keep making money after a disaster. So he identified the functions critical to that ability and planned out how to keep them going after a spectrum of possible interruptions. Then he did something that many might envy: He handed off the business continuity function to a talented underling.