Brent Woodworth, global leader of IBM's Crisis Response Team, said IBM will review a company's existing disaster preparedness procedures and interview company officials to look for gaps in planning. As people become ill, are quarantined or decide to just stay home, companies will be forced to make do with fewer workers and deal with possible supply chain disruptions.

"What are your minimums for operating, and when do you shut down -- when are there things you can no longer do?" said Woodworth, explaining the kinds of issues IBM will study.

Although more companies are beginning to make pandemic plans, most aren't taking any specific steps, said Roberta Witty, an analyst at Gartner Inc. But she said that planning for pandemic is different from planning for the kind of disasters that companies typically prepare for.

Traditional business disaster planning "looks at facility outages, not people outages," said Witty. With that in mind, she recommends advance planning: "You are not going to make these decisions once your workforce is down 30 percent."

Key to coping is ensuring that management is flexible enough to make changes as circumstances shift.