With ever-increasing complexity across hybrid environments, growing regulatory scrutiny, and the rising cost of downtime, legacy IT disaster recovery software approaches can no longer keep pace with enterprise demands. Cutover's next-generation IT disaster recovery solution - featuring agentic AI, runbook automation tools, and end-to-end orchestration - gives organizations the speed, confidence, and control to recover rapidly and reliably. A 2024 Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study commissioned by Cutover found that Cutover Recover delivers a 313% ROI, saving enterprises over $3 million in recovery execution costs alone.
This article covers how Cutover's next-generation IT disaster recovery works, including the Cutover Application Metastore, AI and IT disaster recovery capabilities, agentic AI, and disaster recovery orchestration. We'll also explore the benefits of Cutover Recover and real-world customer outcomes. For a broader view of where the industry is heading, see Cutover's top AI trends shaping IT disaster recovery in 2025.
How Cutover next-generation IT disaster recovery works
Cutover Recover is a SaaS platform that enables enterprises to simplify complexity, streamline work, and increase visibility through AI-powered automated runbooks that connect teams, technology, and systems. The platform standardizes and automates global communications in one place, ensuring the right people are engaged at the right time and senior stakeholders remain continuously informed.
Real-time dashboards allow users to monitor status across the organization, identify areas requiring immediate attention, and continuously improve recovery processes. An immutable, auto-generated audit log makes regulatory reporting straightforward. Cutover Recover also integrates with ITSM, BCM, monitoring, and mass communications tools via REST API to enable seamless, end-to-end recovery.
The four pillars of next-generation IT disaster recovery
Cutover's next-generation IT disaster recovery solution is built on four core pillars that together create a dynamic framework for accelerating preparation, execution, and continuous improvement:
- The Cutover Application Metastore - automated runbook generation from live application data
- AI-powered runbooks - intelligent creation, optimization, and summarization at scale
- Agentic AI - autonomous task execution within governed, human-supervised workflows
- End-to-end automation - orchestration across people, systems, and processes
The Cutover Application Metastore: accelerating next-generation disaster recovery runbook creation
The Cutover Application Metastore aggregates and provides access to up-to-date application data - including CMDB data - to automate the creation of IT disaster recovery runbooks. Rather than manually building DR plans in static tools, the Metastore pulls data from across your organization's systems and uses AI to transform it into structured, automated runbooks in seconds. Learn more about why creating an automated disaster recovery plan is critical for IT applications.
Key performance improvements from the Cutover Application Metastore:
- 75% reduction in IT DR preparation time
- 90% reduction in manual effort for runbook creation
- 50% reduction in IT operations event costs
Runbook templates ensure consistency and governance over the creation process, giving teams control as well as speed. For enterprises managing thousands of applications, this approach makes application-centric DR plans scalable and maintainable.
Cutover AI: driving smarter IT disaster recovery decisions
Cutover AI moves beyond simple task automation, using generative AI to rapidly create, optimize, and orchestrate runbooks for recovery, migration, and release processes - with speed, accountability, and a trusted, explainable paradigm for all complex IT operations. Learn more at Cutover AI-powered runbooks.
Cutover AI Assistant
Cutover AI Assistant integrates natural language processing directly into the platform so teams can better manage runbooks through simple conversations. Ask questions to find and fix blockers on the fly, get instant summaries of runbook outcomes, and make changes fast using natural language commands - without leaving the runbook environment.
AI-powered runbook creation
Build runbooks in minutes, not hours. Cutover AI instantly generates complete runbooks with tasks, dependencies, and descriptions from virtually any static source - including flowcharts, spreadsheets, and documents. Combined with the Cutover Application Metastore, AI Create can automatically generate multiple tailored recovery runbooks at once, cutting IT DR preparation time by 75% and reducing runbook creation manual effort by 90%.
AI-powered runbook improvements and summaries
Cutover AI continuously evaluates runbook effectiveness and suggests intelligent improvements to uncover potential bottlenecks or inefficiencies before they impact a live recovery. Using execution data as part of a continuous improvement cycle, the platform optimizes task dependencies and runbook structure automatically. AI also generates clear runbook summaries from structured data - enabling stakeholders to understand the goal and scope of any runbook at a glance, without manual write-up time.
AI Agent access with Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server
Cutover's MCP Server standardizes how AI LLM models and agents query your operational and resilience data, enabling them to take direct action on runbooks and tasks using natural language. For IT disaster recovery, this means AI systems across your environment can access, update, and trigger Cutover runbooks directly - getting faster insights, seamlessly connecting across systems, and reducing manual toil between tools.
Agentic AI: the next frontier in IT disaster recovery orchestration
Agentic AI takes Cutover beyond automation into intelligent orchestration. Unlike traditional scripts that execute fixed tasks, agentic AI can evaluate recovery outcomes, make decisions, explore alternative strategies, and escalate issues autonomously - all within the governed structure of a Cutover runbook. To understand the architectural foundation that makes this possible, see Cutover's deep-dive on agentic AI and the importance of runbook task models.
Cutover's Agentic agent task type allows third-party AI agents - such as those from ServiceNow and Dynatrace - to be embedded directly into recovery workflows. For a detailed walkthrough, read how Cutover enables agentic AI for IT operations execution. Here's how an end-to-end agentic DR event unfolds:
- Trigger: An AI agent in Dynatrace detects a critical application outage and automatically triggers a pre-configured Cutover recovery runbook.
- Intelligent orchestration: Cutover activates the runbook, assigning tasks to people, automations, and AI agents. A ServiceNow AI agent auto-triages the incident and suggests health checks as recommended actions.
- Controlled execution: Cutover maps AI responses into task comments and executes external functions (e.g., AWS Lambda) to check downstream service health before initiating failover.
- Human oversight: Decision makers observe progress in real time, make manual interventions, and approve critical steps - every action is logged in Cutover's immutable audit environment.
- Audit and improve: After recovery, Cutover captures all logs and performance metrics. Feedback loops improve AI agent logic and refine runbooks for the next event.
As Cutover CTO Kieran Gutteridge stated at the April 2025 agentic AI launch: "The ability of AI agents to take action, learn, and solve complex problems in an explainable and trusted way offers a significant opportunity to accelerate IT operations and drive greater efficiency. For organizations operating under stringent regulatory requirements, maintaining visibility and incorporating human approvals is crucial. Cutover's platform uniquely addresses this by providing a controlled and immutable audit environment for the powerful collaboration between AI agents and human expertise and oversight."
Advanced AI capabilities built into every runbook
The Cutover platform combines cutting-edge AI with enterprise-grade orchestration. Six core AI capabilities underpin every interaction:
Automation: speed and precision in next-generation IT DR
Automation reduces human error and accelerates recovery times. By replacing manual inputs and repetitive tasks, next-generation IT disaster recovery automation improves both speed and accuracy - enabling organizations to recover faster and with greater confidence during high-pressure scenarios.
Cutover Recover supports two types of automation within its runbooks:
- Task automation: Automating individual recovery steps such as backups, instance provisioning, server replication, and failover execution
- Communication automation: Standardizing stakeholder notifications and status updates so the right people are informed at the right time, without manual intervention
Cutover also integrates across the recovery tech stack - including ITSM, BCM, infrastructure-as-code tools, monitoring systems, and mass communication platforms - enabling teams to manage the entire process from a single pane of glass.
DR orchestration: Cutover's unique approach
Orchestration is what separates Cutover from point-solution automation tools. While automation handles individual tasks, orchestration coordinates the full end-to-end recovery workflow - across people, technology, and AI agents - in a structured, sequenced, and governed way.
Cutover's unique approach to IT DR orchestration includes:
- Dynamic runbooks that adapt to real-time conditions and dependency changes during recovery
- Real-time dashboards giving full visibility into recovery status across the organization
- Automated stakeholder communications ensuring coordination across global teams without manual overhead
- Human approval checkpoints embedded within agentic AI workflows to maintain regulatory control
- Immutable audit trails that auto-generate compliance-ready reporting
This orchestration-first model enables enterprises to run more DR tests, cover more applications, and recover faster - while satisfying the audit and governance requirements of regulators.
Benefits of using Cutover Recover for next-generation IT disaster recovery
Cutover Recover has been adopted by leading global enterprises, including some of the world's largest financial institutions. Proven outcomes include:
Real-world applications and success stories
Danske Bank improved its resilience efficiency by 300% using Cutover Recover
The problem
Danske Bank's IT resilience team needed a more effective way to manage resilience activities, driven by increasing regulatory scrutiny and the need to reduce incident risk. Their data center recovery testing relied primarily on spreadsheets and Confluence, limiting them to failing over 130 services in 10 hours.
The solution
Using Cutover Recover, the team orchestrated two large-scale resilience tests. For the first, they converted existing failover plans into a Cutover runbook containing 3,000 tasks. For the second, they took an application-owner approach - uploading individual plans per database service owner, allowing each owner to verify their team's readiness in the lead-up to the event. On test day, the resilience team merged all plans into a single runbook for end-to-end visibility and control. This enabled precise resource allocation, stakeholder verification, and clear sequencing from start to finish.
The results
Cutover Recover enabled Danske Bank to:
- Easily view and map resilience dependencies across thousands of tasks
- Rehearse resilience tests with full stakeholder involvement
- Monitor status via real-time operational resilience dashboards
- Automatically generate an immutable audit trail for regulatory reporting
- Improve resilience efficiency by 300%
- Failover 400 services in 14 hours - compared to 130 in 10 hours previously
Find out more about next-generation IT disaster recovery with Cutover Recover, or request a demo to see agentic AI and orchestration in action.