So your organization has gone global, with mission-critical applications spanning time zones and national borders. You're more extended -- and more vulnerable, relying on not only the glass house down the hall but also on an Internet service provider in Guatemala or a telecommunications company in Kazakhstan to get your fancy Web-enabled applications to customers and suppliers.

How do you protect these far-flung systems against natural or man-made disasters? With a mix of centrally developed recovery processes, enough flexibility to account for local differences in culture and infrastructure, and the clout of upper management to ensure that it all gets done, say IT managers and disaster planning professionals.

Multinational companies have been running global applications for decades, of course. But in the past, they were often hosted on tightly controlled internal computer systems, accessed over expensive but reliable private networks and could tolerate an occasional 24-hour outage. Today's global applications are often a mishmash of custom and off-the-shelf applications running across the less-reliable Web, and because they're important, they must be brought back up within hours or even minutes -- not days -- after a crash.

Global systems often involve not only multiple locations or divisions of a company but also systems controlled by suppliers or customers.

"We have more than 300 [e-commerce] initiatives in our organization," says Julia Graham, group risk manager at London-based Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance Group PLC. "With a Web-based business, you could have many joint venture partners and suppliers, and the plan becomes a matrix of different recovery needs based on the potential scenarios that might arise."

Different regions of the world differ widely in the quality of physical recovery sites and the quality of staff at those sites, say IT managers. And because these applications support vital business functions, they must often be brought back up immediately.

"It's not fun," says Jay Leader, director of application development at Nypro Inc. in Clinton, Mass., a plastics molding company that operates 75 servers and has 4,000 users around the world. "It's hard enough . . . to do domestically, when everyone speaks the same language and is in the same time zone," he says, but it's even harder "to try to coordinate an [IT] vendor in Singapore and a vendor from China."

The first step should be for business managers -- ideally at the local business units, to ensure their buy-in -- to decide what applications are most in need of protection and how much protection they're worth. This is often the point at which the critical but touchy issue of who will pay for this "application insurance" should get tackled but often isn't, says Gerard Minnich, a global business continuity program manager at Electronic Data Systems Corp. in Plano, Texas.

"Typically, where programs fail is at the [funding] level," he says, especially at a local business unit. Along with a corporate edict to provide disaster recovery, says Minnich, management must also provide a clear process for determining backup priorities and how to fund them.

"If you don't have guidelines and you don't have criteria,

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