Disaster Recovery Journal Summer 2025

Disaster vs. Cyber Recovery Closing the Gap to Bolster Resiliency

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By CHRIS MONTGOMERY

efore the cloud, IT resil ience was defined by an organization’s ability to maintain operations during events like natural disas ters, power outages, van dalism or any other incident knocking out access to underlying technology they

what it means to be resilient, forcing busi nesses to establish their own cyber recov ery plans alongside historical disaster recovery strategies that might trace to the pre-cloud era. Of the two, cyber recovery remains the bigger challenge. In fact, 70% of busi nesses think it’s more problematic than disaster recovery, according to a recent survey conducted with 500 IT and cyber security professionals from midmar ket and enterprise organizations across North America, Western Europe and Asia Pacific. Having an effective cyber recovery strategy in the cloud era is crucial to the

continuity of a business. Whether it’s a cyberattack or an update gone awry, enter prises must prepare for digital disruptions that could take critical services offline for extended periods of time — amounting to potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. As reliance on data and AI technologies continues to grow, the risks of extended downtime will escalate. That doesn’t mean disaster recov ery isn’t still difficult — or important. However, with 52% of organizations still basing their cyber recovery strategies on longstanding disaster recovery plans, it’s key businesses understand the differ ences and similarities between the two.

owned and operated. Increasingly, enterprises must consider not just the IT hardware they own and operate, but also the vast environment of services that reside in external cloud envi ronments. This breakdown of the historic “perimeter” security model has altered

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