As a business magazine for technology professionals, Computing has no real desire to write about terrorism. But once again, with great regret, such despicable acts have been forced onto the radar of IT decision-makers.

Over the past week, there has been much written about how the outrages perpetrated in Mumbai might affect India’s burgeoning IT sector -­ perhaps the biggest success story of one of the fastest-developing economies in the world.

It is with genuine reluctance that we add our thoughts to the debate.

Considerations such as offshore outsourcing are so entirely trivial compared with the appalling and tragic loss of life and the impact on people’s everyday lives in India. But it is inevitable that IT leaders will be faced with worried chief executives asking them whether or not the attacks will affect their offshore plans. Many of the big banks, for example ­- struggling already with the financial crisis ­- are dependent on Indian suppliers for development work that will be key to their survival in a recession.

There are parallels with the 9/11 attacks in the US and the 7/7 bombings in London. Amid all the carnage, it wasn’t long before some technology experts were raising the issues of disaster recovery and business continuity. Then, as now, a sense of perspective is the most important response.

In purely business terms, New York and Washington soon got back on their feet. London took great pride in proving that it was more resilient than its attackers hoped. Mumbai will do the same.

The worst thing that Western companies could do is review their offshore outsourcing plans. Such business relationships are more important to India now than ever. It is becoming a cliché, but we must not do anything that suggests the terrorists are winning.

Indian IT suppliers are global organisations, with offshore development centres around the world. The horror of Mumbai will not affect their ability to deliver ­ even as it clearly has a huge emotional impact on their employees.

IT leaders are right to be aware of the risks, but would be wrong to turn their back on India now.

With the economic crisis showing no signs of ending soon, the only certainty in the next 12 months will be uncertainty.

Clearly, financial services firms will be hardest hit, but the knock-on effects will be widespread.

However, past experience suggests that innovative users of IT will be best positioned to emerge the strongest from troubled times.

The constraints within which IT leaders will have to operate will test many. Capital expenditure will be tightly controlled, and considering that most major hardware purchases ­ and often large software licence deals too ­ are financed through leasing, with the cost of debt so high the options will be limited.

For small or medium-sized businesses, there will inevitably be a lot of interest in software-as-a-service, hosting, cloud computing and other online pay-as-you-go offerings that minimise or even avoid an up-front payment.

For bigger businesses, the spectre of outsourcing will loom large. There aren’t many major firms that have not outsourced at least some aspect of their IT operations already, and the potential for budget cuts and the conversion of direct costs to operational expenses gives a financial imperative that may be hard to argue against.

But there are plenty of technology options too. There is no silver bullet, no next big thing that IT leaders can turn to. But there are still plenty of current big things that offer significant potential savings ­ virtualisation, voice over IP and mobile working, to name but three of many.

Whatever route you prefer to choose, there is one action that all IT leaders need to take.

In previous downturns, there was much talk of bridging the IT-business divide to survive unscathed. Yet here we are again, and still the gap often seems as wide as ever.

There will rarely be a better opportunity for IT to work with its business counterparts to plot a route through all the current uncertainty. Let’s not waste this chance to cross that divide and close it once and for all.

To say that globalisation is everywhere may seem tautological, but the statement is not as simplistic as it appears.

Clearly, national distinctions are less relevant as business goes global. But the shift from bulk offshoring of low-level processes, to Indian firms such as HCL pitching themselves as “innovation partners” (Rising costs force India to shift focus to partnerships) is taking the principle to the next level.

HCL is right. As geographic differences are eroded, so businesses can make more complex choices about where to get what they need.

Liverpool Victoria’s decision to ditch its monolithic £160m, 13-year deal with EDS in favour of multi-sourced services managed by an in-house team (Insurance firm cancels £160m EDS contract) can be viewed in the same light.

As can EMI turning to the financial services industry to learn how to handle the revolutionary change affecting the music business (EMI tunes up digital strategy).

Just as business is increasingly geographically dispersed, so the business of business is becoming more universal.

The result is that lessons can be learned, expertise shared and problems innovatively managed on a piecemeal basis ­ one solution from another supplier, one from a different industry, and one from another country.

There is an untold wealth of opportunities, both in terms of new markets to be exploited and of new routes around old obstacles. But the skills required are subtly different.

Some may complain that memory recall is suffering: phone numbers are all kept in mobile phones, and schoolchildren no longer rote-learn poetry.

But to access those phone numbers requires an understanding of structured menu systems. And children need to develop advanced search skills to find what they want amid the morass of available information.

Similarly, IT managers no longer need to know all the answers. What they do need is to be adept at looking out across Thomas Friedman’s “flat world” and seeing where a creative solution might be found.