As the IT landscape continues to evolve, IT disaster recovery challenges are increasing tremendously. Hybrid environments with countless applications create complex dependencies, making IT disaster recovery a daunting task. Enterprises need sophisticated solutions to ensure resilience and streamline recovery in these intricate settings – all while aiming to reduce costs, minimize downtime, and simplify regulatory reporting.
This article overviews the current state and limitations of traditional IT disaster recovery (IT DR), the future of disaster recovery, the impact of automation, and how automated disaster recovery software and AI-enabled runbooks will shape the future.
The current state of IT disaster recovery
Today's IT environments are a mix of on-premises, cloud, and SaaS applications, leading to exponential growth in operational complexity. However, the pressure to maintain resilience for critical applications remains high. Plus, enterprises struggle to meet customer and regulatory demands due to the lack of an efficient, repeatable approach to application recovery at scale. Traditional methods filled with manual steps and outdated data simply won't work anymore.
Limitations of traditional IT DR
The modern enterprise IT landscape is experiencing unprecedented complexity due to rapid software innovation, AI integration, and the presence of multiple cloud service providers (CSPs) alongside thousands of software vendors. This complexity is creating challenges in maintaining operational controls and regulatory compliance, particularly in regulated industries like Financial Services, Healthcare, and Government sectors.
The traditional IT disaster recovery (DR) approach is being replaced by dynamic applications, workload resilience, and recovery automation. Organizations are adopting tiered classification systems (typically 0-5) for application criticality. This evolution reflects the need for more sophisticated resilience and recovery strategies in hybrid environments.
Key components of future disaster recovery
This evolution in IT resilience and recovery practices represents a significant shift from traditional disaster recovery to a more agile and modern approach. It emphasizes the need for dynamic, automated solutions that can handle the complexity of modern, hybrid IT environments while keeping people in the loop for decision making, and meeting increasingly stringent regulatory requirements.
Automated runbooks and templates
While the concept of automated, dynamic runbooks isn’t new, it will continue to be a standard element of the future of IT disaster recovery. Static, manual spreadsheets or documents cannot scale to meet the complexity or volume of enterprise application recovery across hybrid IT estates. Comprehensive recovery plans including both the manual and automated tasks in a centralized and automated runbook will be critical for resilience.
And, the days of building recovery plans or runbooks from scratch are long gone. The future includes pre-defined IT disaster recovery templates that consider both recovery strategies (backup & restore, pilot light, etc.) and infrastructure architectures (on-premises, cloud, etc.), providing enterprises a strong foundation to then customize plans to their unique configurations and setup.
Automation of manual tasks
Automation to eliminate repetitive tasks will be another cornerstone of the future of IT disaster recovery but it shouldn’t stop at automating simple workflows. Automating more complex workflows, such as the creation of IT DR plans or runbooks, can save teams hours worth of time while also improving accuracy by reducing potential manual errors.
AI integration
Going another step further, Artificial intelligence (AI) will certainly be a part of the future of IT disaster recovery. AI is expected to bring efficiency and significantly reduce manual effort in IT disaster recovery.
Whether it’s creating, summarizing, or improving recovery plans, AI will bring a world of potential and enterprises are getting excited. Cutover’s recent IT disaster and cyber recovery trends report found that 76% of enterprises believe AI will transform the execution of DR plans and there’s more to come on how AI will be used for disaster recovery.
The future of IT resilience
The future of IT resilience will include ensuring resiliency is built into IT system support and processes, proactively measuring resilience with realistic IT DR scenario tests, increasing process efficiency to reduce downtime, and being agile to make continuous improvements.
Proactive measures
In IT disaster recovery, a proactive approach can help significantly reduce downtime - proactivity includes regularly testing recovery scenarios, ideally by application tiers. By regularly exercising IT disaster scenarios, the failover process becomes more routine which reduces overhead and ensures team preparedness.
Continuous process improvements
To keep pace with a dynamic, ever-changing environment, you need agility. The future of IT disaster recovery will require real time updates on application metadata and continuous DR plan improvements to ensure recovery methods are effective.
The next generation of IT disaster recovery with Cutover
Cutover Recover can help take your enterprise into the next generation of IT disaster recovery with automated runbooks that standardize and accelerate recovery across dynamic and varied IT estates. Cutover Recover includes:
- Prescriptive guidance and templates: Gain accuracy and precision with pre-defined recovery plans and runbook templates.
- Auto-generated application-specific runbooks: Leverage the Cutover Application Metastore to reduce runbook creation time by 90%.
- AI-powered innovation: Utilize Cutover AI to build and improve runbooks with the power of artificial intelligence.
- Real-time reporting and analytics: Gain valuable insights from dashboards to help you continuously improve your IT operations processes and meet regulatory requirements.
Learn more about how Cutover can help support your enterprise for the next generation of IT disaster recovery. Book a demo or email info@cutover.com.