Description TIMBUS extends traditional digital preservation approaches by introducing the need to analyse and preserve services, and by aligning preservation actions with business continuity management.A primary motivation for TIMBUS is the declining use of centralised in-house business processes. Based on the concept of software as a service and on Internet services, business processes are increasingly supported by systems offered by different providers and located in various geographical locations. These are not only continuously changing and evolving but might even be discontinued if services or service providers disappear, leaving partially complete business processes behind.Therefore, TIMBUS researchers endeavour to enlarge the understanding of digital preservation to include the set of activities, processes and tools that ensure continued access to services and software. This enlarged understanding brings digital preservation into the domain of business continuity management.This approach will allow for reproducing the execution context in which information can be accessed, properly rendered, validated and transformed into knowledge. One of the fundamental requirements for achieving this is to preserve the functional and non-functional specifications of services and software, along with their dependencies. This is more challenging than the plain preservation of data since elements such as versioning, licensing, cryptographic schemes, data formats, host-system environments, architectures and hardware requirements of software continue to change over time. The TIMBUS consortium shows a strong participation of the IT industry, combined with industrial and academic research labs.