Slate Moneybox columnist Daniel Gross recently wrote a piece about how Iceland’s volcano troubles revealed weaknesses in the global supply chain. Or didn’t.

Cisco Systems was able to carry on, announcing its $3.3 billion acquisition of Norwegian teleconferencing company Tandberg in a joint virtual press conference. The ash cloud may have kept the companies’ respective CEOs physically apart, but the ether brought them together. As Gross points out, this is an example of how we use information technology to create redundancy.

For business, investing in redundancy is a form of insurance. And for those in the business of trading information, this insurance comes relatively cheap. They won’t divulge the locations, but most major Wall Street firms have backup trading floors in the Northeast—desks, chairs, and computer equipment that lie fallow. If a manmade or natural crisis shuts down their Manhattan headquarters, workers can show up, flip a few switches, and start trading derivatives. Google says that “every action you take in Gmail [and other programs] is simultaneously replicated in two data centers at once.” If one fails, the user won’t experience a disruption. A company spokesman says Google has put a lot of thought into the “geographic diversification” of data center site selections, so that if one area of the globe is affected by a disaster, traffic can be routed to another. And with the rise of cloud computing, everyone can have a redundant computer network. Backing up data used to mean keeping an external hard drive on the desk next to the PC—a move that doesn’t provide much insurance if the house is flooded. Now, a host of services offer companies and individuals the ability to store data off-site. If a house burns down in New Jersey, a homeowner would still be able to gain access to the contents of her hard drive, which may be stored in a data center in Iceland.

At the same time, not everything can be made redundant. The airline industry found out to the tune of $1.7 billion.

Natural phenomena have laid bare the fact that the networks that power our economy are both fragile and really expensive to make redundant. Consider electricity. The recent windstorm in the northeastern United States sent homes and offices back to the 19th century for several days. But installing a home generator that can seamlessly pick up the electric load when the utility fails would cost several thousand dollars. Manufacturers can’t keep empty, fully equipped factories on standby, with workers on call, in case an epidemic in China halts exports. It would cost too much.

The volcano created the real, tangible need to come up with creative solutions (or suffer the impossibilities). But what happens if we take the emergency out of the equation? What happens if we look at how our attitudes about work create a (potentially) false divide between Plan A and Plan B?

Traditionalists will say that if people can’t get together in the same physical space then the work can’t get done. They will argue that the real work only happens face-to-face. Better to reschedule than to conference in, use Skype, or (heaven forbid) e-mail.

Of course, there’s also plenty of people who understand that if people can’t get together then the work might get done virtually. But not all of them are equally on board. There are the people who will argue that virtual work is good enough for an emergency, but the quality suffers. They would still prefer to work face-to-face. In our experience only a small minority makes no judgment about physical presence.

The different attitudes remind us of Jenn’s response to Michael Salamey’s recent post about rail time and “-ish” time. Jenn noted that we don’t have to choose between rail time and “-ish” time. We can have both.

The same is true for virtual work. Smart business leaders will take a lesson from the volcano and create contingency plans for the work that absolutely cannot be done virtually. But they will also find ways to unleash the hidden potential in their redundancies. We can imagine a manager going through each task, process or system in his or her department and playing a little game. How would we keep this aspect of our business going during an emergency? And is that way of doing business just as good (or better) than how we do things now?