Establishing an action plan in the event of a catastrophic system failure can help professionals in network support protect and recover your data, helping to ensure business continuity. All IT systems must experience some degree of downtime. Whether for updates or performing preventative maintenance, your IT systems will need to be offline for some time. The good thing about planned downtime is that you can let your team and customers know about it beforehand. You can even work around the schedule to minimize the potential impact. However, unplanned downtime is another story.