Disaster Recovery Journal Spring 2024

businesses are left unprepared for disasters related to new technologies and services or emerging cyber threats. u DR readiness dashboards remain poorly adopted . Only 31% of respondents reported having a dashboard to indicate recovery readiness for their organization (see Figure 7). Without effective reporting, addressing gaps or problems in the DR program is impossible. Businesses seeking enhanced DR capability need tooling which will help them assess how recoverable their infrastructure is. Backup and DR vendors are working to make this process easier with the inclusion of synthetic and automatic test routines as well as tracking recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) thresholds to help identify applications and services which are violating stated policies. DR Site Preparedness and Failover Testing Lack Scope and Frequency A key component of DR prepared ness is having an alternate site to launch workloads in the case of a failure. Those DR sites are usually prepopulated with replicated data, virtual machine (VM) or container images, and the relevant auto mation to orchestrate failover in the case of crisis. Public and private cloud technol ogies have reduced the need for dedicated disaster recovery sites with many busi nesses implementing disaster-recovery as-a-service (DRaaS) strategies which use pre-cached data, infrastructure-as-code automation, and pilot light infrastructure to minimize resource utilization until the point of failover. u Current DR sites don’t protect the full spectrum of critical services firms rely on . Ninety-three percent of enterprises have at least one DR site; 34% have more than one (see Figure 8). Given only around 50% of organizations have an enterprise-wide DR program, much of the DR or DRaaS infrastructure businesses

maintain only address a subset of DR needs. Additionally, discussions with DR professionals have indicated many traditional DR sites aren’t properly sized to accommodate a full-site failover.

12 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | SPRING 2024