Disaster Recovery Journal Spring 2024

ity practices (see Figure 12). Specifically, many respondents said they have already adopted or plan to adopt practices which improve the ability to respond to emergent errors and failures as they happen, like site reliability engineering (SRE), infrastruc ture as code (IaC) automation, and chaos engineering (see Figure 13). Underlying many of these technology practices is the infrastructure shift to cloud-native com puting using containers; just under half of 34 respondents reported operation of production workloads in Kubernetes envi ronments. Forrester has found in other studies, nearly two-thirds of enterprises are adopting Kubernetes in private and public cloud. This discrepancy highlights a disconnect between what DR profession als expect to protect versus what is actu ally being adopted. Supplemental Material Research Methodologies For the Forrester/Disaster Recovery Journal November 2023 Disaster Recovery Practices and Preparedness Survey, Forrester and the Disaster Recovery Journal (DRJ) conducted a joint survey. The survey was fielded globally to IT, disaster recovery (DR), and risk professionals with affiliations to both Forrester Research and the DRJ as well as to a randomized list of IT, DR, and risk professionals. Additionally, on LinkedIn

in business continuity and disaster recovery publications, online discussions, etc. They have above-average knowledge of best practices and technology in business continuity/DR. A second set of respondents was solicited based on their professional title in IT, DR, or risk management. This list was randomly generated. Additional responses were solicited via social media on LinkedIn and Twitter for a semi-random response set. With a combina tion of random and nonrandom responses, the survey serves as a valuable tool in understanding where both advanced and average users are today as well as where the industry is headed. Special thanks to Lauren Nelson, Amy DeMartine, Lauren Alexander, and Jen Barton of Forrester Research for their con tributions. v Brent Ellis is a senior analyst of technology architecture and delivery with Forrester Research. He serves technology leaders by providing holistic thinking related to technology resilience and the alignment of tech invest ments with business needs. His goal is to help clients find the right mix of technologies, processes, and people to maximize their goals and provide the unique value they have to the world. Ellis is particularly focused on reliable and resilient IT services, storage, cloud infrastructure adoption, mainframe modernization, and busi ness technology alignment.

and Twitter, we solicited responses from technology profession als with responsibility for DR planning. This process generated a total of 90 responses, 46 indicating they have a disaster recovery program and were able to complete the survey. In this survey: u Thirty-three percent of respondents were from companies which had 0 to 999 employees (defined by Forrester as small and medium-size businesses); 18% had 1,000 to 4,999 employees; 26% had 5,000 to 19,999 employees; and 23% had 20,000 or more employees. u All respondents were decision-makers or influencers in regard to planning and purchasing technology and services related to disaster recovery. u Respondents were from a variety of industries. One part of the response set for this study was solicited from a select group of respondents (predominantly DRJ members and Forrester clients) and is therefore not random. These respondents are more sophisticated than the average. They read and participate

16 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | SPRING 2024