Disaster Recovery Journal Spring 2026

Modern Workloads Are Forcing a Rethink of Traditional DR As enterprise architectures shift to SaaS, cloud-native platforms, and emerg ing workloads like Kubernetes and AI, DR strategies are being stress-tested in new ways. Survey results not only show prog ress in expanding DR scope beyond tradi tional infrastructure but also expose gaps in maturity, consistency, and confidence – particularly for SaaS and complex cloud dependencies. The following sections highlight where adoption is strongest, where practices are evolving, and where DR teams still face the greatest resilience challenges. n Enterprise SaaS adoption is high, making it a priority for DR planning. More than 94% of respondents indicated they were using Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, or other enterprise SaaS tools. Furthermore, 93% of respondents considered all or some SaaS platforms in their DR planning. Even though leading SaaS platforms offer a robust backup ecosystem, SaaS resilience varies widely by application. Backing up SaaS data can be challenging, and true operational resilience requires far more than backup alone. Forrester’s “How To Create A SaaS Application Resilience Strategy, 2026” helps document strategies for recovery and resilience for SaaS applications and explains the reasons why enterprises should build a separate strategy for SaaS application resilience. n DR for cloud workloads is maturing

slowly. Cloud disasters typically take the form of service outages or degradation, with complex downstream impacts driven by cloud interdependencies. In 2025, prolonged outages at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Cloudflare underscored this risk for organizations incorporating public cloud workloads into DR planning. Within this group, most respondents rely on intraprovider resiliency mechanisms such as failover between availability zones, with very limited use of cross cloud failover. A key challenge for cloud workloads is understanding both their risk exposure and the built‑in resiliency of cloud services. The October 2025 AWS US‑East outage showed how hidden dependencies, service concentration,

16 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | SPRING 2026