For international firms, routine workloads can be shared among sites in different countries or different continents. This strategy can provide almost-immediate resumption capacity, depending on the systems supporting the operations and the communications and operating capacity at each site. The strategy also addresses many of the key vulnerabilities of the traditional model.
For example, technology must be kept current at all active operating sites for normal business operations to proceed. At the same time, the split-operations approach can have significant costs, in terms of maintaining excess capacity at each site and of adding operating complexity. This approach may be more suited to some types of business activities, such as trading, clearing, and settlement, than to others.