Disaster Recovery Journal Spring 2026

Why 2026 Will Redefine Disaster Recovery as We Know It

AI Outages Become the New Ransomware Moment Ransomware exposed a hard truth and consequently changed the conversa tion about resilience. Many organizations believed they were prepared, until they were not. AI is heading toward the same reckon ing. In 2026, AI will be deeply embedded in customer service, fraud detection, claims processing, logistics, analytics, and deci sion automation. When those systems go down, the impact will not be theoretical. For customers, regulators, and the busi ness itself, it will be immediate and highly visible. Many AI systems today are built on infrastructure that was never designed for continuous availability, which is a problem. Rather than being treated like the mission-critical components they are, databases, pipelines, and connectivity are often treated like supporting actors. Teams focus on deploying models and tuning performance, but not always on how those

By DON BOXLEY, Jr.

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istorically, disaster recovery has been treated like an insurance policy – you invested in it, docu mented it, tested it occasionally, and hoped you would never need it. I suppose, for a time that

AI is no longer experimental. Multi-cloud is no longer optional. And disruption, whether from outages, security events, regulation, or environmental factors, is no longer rare. It is routine. As we look at 2026, three shifts stand out from where I sit. Together, they signal a fundamental change in how organiza tions must think about availability, recov ery, and continuity.

approach worked well enough. That era is ending.

As we push forward into 2026, the forces reshaping IT operations are also redefining what resilience really means.

36 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | SPRING 2026