Disaster Recovery Journal Spring 2024

u Failover isn’t tested enough . More than half of enterprises do a partial or full failover to their DR site (see Figure 9). Many organizations only test component by-component DR failover, which has limited usefulness. Partial failover doesn’t simulate true data center outages and the complications those types of outages bring. Ideally, an organization will be able to fail fully to a DR test location and fail back seamlessly. However, practices show the current state of DR infrastructure is less than ideal. Disaster Recovery for Cloud Workloads Is Slowly Maturing Cloud is hardly new, but in the area of disaster planning, it’s still immature. In 2023, we saw several outages from major hyperscalers and many small outages from smaller cloud and hosting providers. Just under one-half of respondents reported they were able to failover workloads to alternate availability zones or regions in the same cloud provider. Surprisingly, about 8% of respondents do DR in alter nate cloud providers, and many respon dents (16%) failover public cloud-based workloads to an on-premises data center (see Figure 10). One difficulty for cloud based workloads is determining the risks a workload is exposed to and understanding the default resiliency of the cloud services being used. Even things like hyperscaled automation can introduce risks which are unfamiliar to seasoned DR professionals. Strategies for ensuring cloud resiliency are maturing even as enterprises continue to evolve application architecture to include more third-party services, often shifting risk mitigation from technical remedies to contractual and legal methods. Enterprise SaaS Adoption Is High, Making It a Priority for DR Planning More than 86% of respondents indicated

Resilience Strategy, providing resilience for vendor-provided ser vices is more than just backing up the data; it can mean consider ing alternative platforms, custom SLAs and shared risk, or even legal protections as part of one’s resilience strategy. Resilience-Related Practices Are Gaining Traction for Production Workloads Businesses are overwhelmingly transitioning how they address DR planning with the adoption of resilience and reliabil-

they are using Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, or other enterprise SaaS tools (see Figure 11). Furthermore, 96% of respondents, from a base of 36 total respondents, consider all or some SaaS platforms in their DR planning. While major platforms like the three identified in this survey have a robust ecosystem of backup options, not all SaaS are created equally, and backup of SaaS applications can be tricky. Additionally, as enumerated in Forrester’s How To Create A SaaS Application

14 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | SPRING 2024