"Its not an easy task but you have to tackle those that give you the heartache first and you just work through them," he said. "E-mail was the first one we worked through. Keeping customers happy is number two."

Reviewing business operations to determine what functions are truly critical is the CFO's duty and key to developing a sound plan, said Suzie Ray, a principal at Ernst & Young and leader of the firm's business-continuity disaster recovery practice for America.

"If you just talk to a person in a business area [and] they say, 'I'm important and I need it now,' [then] there's got to be some vetting out from a strategic view," she said. "You take all of a business' processes, and you put them in a critical path based on recovery times."

After the path is defined, CFOs can then determine "if the organization is investing in the appropriate recovery strategies that meet the needs of the business," she added. "There is a dollar associated with protecting that path."

At Testa Produce, the money spent on shoring up the Chicago company's key infrastructure also helps the produce and dairy distributor retain customers.