What was broken about IT disaster recovery before Cutover Recover?
These teams couldn't run large-scale IT disaster recovery tests with any real confidence. Single-application failover testing was capped. Regulators and customers wanted more than they could deliver.
The cause was manual process. Spreadsheets. Slow to update, easy to break, and nobody fully trusted them.
"Nobody trusts a spreadsheet," said one senior manager for business continuity and crisis management.
No shared source of truth meant no clear ownership during a test, no real audit trail, and less confidence going into an actual recovery.
How much can IT disaster recovery teams save with Cutover Recover?
Forrester quantified three benefits over three years:
- $188,000 from faster IT disaster recovery planning. Teams build runbook steps together instead of trading emails and sitting through status meetings.
- $3.0 million from a 50% cut in execution time. Real-time visibility means people know exactly when to step in. A mistake that used to take 30 minutes to fix now takes a couple of minutes.
- $31,000 from an 80% cut in audit and post-test analysis time. One read-only log replaces pulling data from five different places. Regulators have never questioned it.
Total: $3.17 million in risk-adjusted benefits.
What does IT disaster recovery cost with Cutover Recover?
Three-year, risk-adjusted costs: $769,000. Software subscription fees scaling from 100 to 150 users, SSO integration, implementation, and onboarding.
Interviewees called implementation straightforward. Cutover helped migrate existing DR plans into the platform. Ongoing training stayed minimal — the platform doesn't need much hand-holding.
What benefits didn't make it into the financial model?
Some value never made it into the spreadsheet:
- Employees stop waiting on a bridge call for hours. They know almost exactly when they're needed and when they're done.
- Transparent, tamper-proof reporting builds trust with regulators and leadership.
- Several teams are already using Cutover beyond disaster recovery — cloud migrations, application release management, and other complex, task-heavy work.
"There's a big difference between finishing at midnight and finishing at 2 or 3 a.m. Just psychologically for the team. That is a big difference," said one executive director of DR testing.
Payback in under six months
Cutover Recover turned IT disaster recovery from a manual, low-confidence exercise into something faster, better documented, and built to scale.
It paid for itself in under six months. Over three years, it delivered $2.4 million in net present value.
[Download the full Forrester TEI report (PDF)] for the complete cost and benefit models, risk adjustments, and methodology.
This Total Economic Impact™ study was commissioned by Cutover and conducted independently by Forrester Consulting, based on interviews with four organizations using Cutover Recover. It is not meant to be used as a competitive analysis.
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