Disaster Recovery Journal Spring 2026

DR Site Preparedness and Failover Testing Lack Scope and Frequency A key component of DR preparedness is having an alternate site to launch work loads in the case of failure. Those DR sites are usually prepopulated with replicated data, virtual machine or container images, and the relevant automation to orchestrate failover in the case of crisis. Public and private cloud technologies have reduced the need for dedicated DR sites, with many businesses implementing disaster recovery-as-a-service strategies which use precached data, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) automation, and pilot light infra structure to minimize resource utilization until the point of failover. n Most businesses have at least one DR site. Sixty-three percent of enterprises had at least one DR site, with 30% of respondents having more than one (see Figure 9). However, increased use of cloud and SaaS means site-to-site failover does not address many core workloads. Additionally, given around 50% of organizations have an enterprise-wide DR program, many organizations may not provide resilience for core applications that are not visible to their DR planning functions. Based on direct conversations with DR leaders, issues related to poor criticality mapping, cost, and capacity planning reduce effectiveness of current DR site investments. n Failover isn’t tested frequently

enough. Forty percent of respondents reported their organization did a partial or full failover to their DR site (see Figure 10). Many organizations only test component by-component DR failover, which doesn’t replicate actual failure scenarios when an entire datacenter may be affected at once. Composable architectures like microservices also increase complexity, making component tests difficult, and can spread the blast radius of failure far beyond an isolated infrastructure environment. DR leaders should at least annually do a full scenario according to their DR runbooks and additionally test after major infrastructure or platform changes to ensure existing DR plans are still relevant.

14 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | SPRING 2026