7 Questions Every CIO and CSO Should Ask About Disaster Recovery in 2026

Disaster recovery is having a moment in 2026. For years it sat quietly in the background of IT operations—important, but rarely the topic of a board meeting. The shift started in 2025: Gartner’s CIO Leadership Perspective Survey of 2,200 IT executives ranked cybersecurity and risk management as the top CIO priority for the fourth year running, citing the need to recover quickly from attacks as a key driver.

The momentum has carried into 2026. Omdia’s March 2026 technology spending survey now lists disaster recovery and continuity as the leading IT management investment areas. Behind the shift is a different kind of threat than the floods and power outages most DR programs were originally built for.

Consider this. Ransomware attacks surged 58% year over year in 2025, making it the most active year on record according to GuidePoint Security’s GRIT 2026 Ransomware & Cyber Threat Report. Manufacturing was the most heavily targeted sector, followed by technology, retail and wholesale, and healthcare—industries that depend on mission-critical ERP and complex application ecosystems to keep operations running.

In response, enterprise IT is rethinking disaster recovery. The traditional disaster recovery question of “can we get the data center back up” is now joined by a broader one: “can we recover the business when the threat actor is already inside?” Cyber-resilient disaster recovery is built to answer that second question.

Disaster Recovery vs. Cyber-Resilient Disaster Recovery

To be clear, traditional disaster recovery and cyber-resilient disaster recovery are related, but they solve different problems.

Traditional disaster recovery is about restoring IT functions when something significant goes wrong. A region failure caused by a natural event can take an entire cloud region offline. A data center failure can affect a single facility within a region. Network and infrastructure failures, application failures, and configuration changes can all create outages of varying severity.

The goal is to minimize data loss (the recovery point objective, or RPO) and time to recovery (the recovery time objective, or RTO) using cold, warm, or hot standby infrastructure ready to take on the workload. In modern hyperconverged or cloud computing environments, the infrastructure is coupled with robust automation and orchestration tools to ensure the correct business functions are restored in the proper order.

Cyber-resilient disaster recovery addresses a fundamentally different scenario.

In a cyber event, the assets are not necessarily destroyed, but the data, the backups, and even the recovery solution itself may be compromised. It can require immediate isolation of mission-critical workloads and data while the scope of the compromise is being investigated.

Immutable backups, air-gapped networks, ransomware scanning, and third-party validation can all be part of a cyber-resilient disaster recovery solution. The recovery point objective data loss is higher, as backups need to be restored from immutable backups, and the recovery time objective can be slower than traditional DR if data validation was not previously performed as part of the backup process.

These two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Traditional DR handles infrastructure events. Cyber-resilient DR handles the very different challenge of a destructive cyber attack. In other words, the architecture that protects against a hyperscaler region or data center failure is not the same as the architecture that protects against a ransomware attack. For organizations that want true end-to-end protection, both have a role to play in their business continuity and disaster recovery programs.

Why Cyber-Resilient DR Is the Priority Right Now

The investment data tells part of the story, as executives are spending more in response to a real shift in the threat landscape. According to industry surveys, most executives are increasing funding for cyber and information security in 2026, putting it among the highest-priority categories next to AI and GenAI.

Demand is growing for ownership of disaster recovery to move under a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), reflecting a broader organizational focus on cyber resilience. That is a structural change. It places DR firmly inside the security conversation, alongside identity, endpoint protection, and threat response, rather than treating it as a separate operational backstop.

For organizations running mission-critical ERP—SAP, Oracle EBS, JD Edwards, and the application ecosystems around them—this matters even more. ERPs hold the data that adversaries most want to corrupt or encrypt, and the systems whose unavailability hurts the business the most.

Do You Really Have Disaster Recovery?

This is the question CIOs and CSOs should consider, because the gap between “we have a DR plan” and “we have a DR program that will actually work” is often wider than expected. Seven questions help reveal where an organization actually stands.

1. Is cloud infrastructure capacity available?
A workload running in the cloud does not automatically have disaster recovery. The compute, storage, and network capacity needed for failover has to be reserved, provisioned, or rapidly available in the target region. If it is not, the DR plan stops at the first step.

2. Are infrastructure configurations replicated?
The servers and storage are not enough on their own. Network settings, security rules, identity integrations, monitoring agents, and dozens of other configurations need to exist in the recovery environment. Otherwise, the systems come up but cannot be used.

3. Is data replicated, and at what interval?
This is the recovery point objective (RPO) in practice. Continuous replication produces a near-zero recovery point objective. Daily backups produce up to 24 hours of potential data loss. The right answer depends on what the business can tolerate, and many organizations have never actually defined that tolerance.

4. Are backups consistent and recoverable?
A backup that completes successfully is not the same as a backup that restores successfully. Database consistency, application-aware snapshots, and validation against known-good baselines all matter. Adding cyber resilience means asking the harder question too: is this backup immutable, air-gapped, and validated against ransomware indicators before restoration.

5. Is the orchestration for all of this automated?
Complex application ecosystems must be recovered in a specific order. The ERP, databases, middleware, integrations, and front-end systems all have dependencies on each other. Manual recovery at 2 a.m. is where DR programs tend to fall apart. Automation is what makes the difference between a successful failover and an extended outage.

6. Is the process documented and accessible?
Documentation is only useful if people can reach it when they need it. If the runbooks live in a system that is currently down, or if the people who wrote them are unreachable, the plan is incomplete. Accessibility during a real event is a design requirement, not an afterthought.

7. Have you tested the solution successfully?
A DR program that has never been fully tested is a hypothesis. Most organizations perform bubble tests, which run in an isolated environment and validate that systems come up. Fewer perform full DR tests, where production is taken offline and operations actually shift to the secondary site. Fewer still perform failover and failback tests that confirm the recovery procedures are reversible.

The closer the testing comes to a real disaster scenario, the more confident the organization can be in the outcome.

A “yes” to all seven means the DR program is genuinely operational. Any “no” is a gap worth understanding, because that is the gap a future event may expose.

Syntax: Your Disaster Recovery as a Service Partner

Modernizing a DR program is not a one-step project, and it does not require a complete tear-down of what already exists. Most organizations can improve their recovery point objective and recovery time objective and add ransomware protection without dramatically increasing cost. They just need a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) partner who can see the full picture across applications, infrastructure, and cloud.

At Syntax, our cyber-resilient disaster recovery practice spans assessment, implementation, and managed services. A DR assessment establishes a clear view of current state, defines the maximum acceptable outage (MAO), and produces a total cost of ownership analysis with recommendations for improving recovery point objective and recovery time objective. From there, our team can design and implement DR for individual workloads or entire application ecosystems, including the orchestration and automation that make the difference under pressure.

Syntax is a certified, multicloud service provider for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with deep capabilities supporting workloads on Nutanix, IBM i Series, IBM Power, and Oracle Solaris in both our own and customers’ data centers. Our rich history building disaster recovery solutions for mission-critical ERP solutions from SAP and Oracle—and the complex application ecosystems that connect to them—puts us in pole position to expand those solutions to cyber-resilient DR configurations.

Cyber security risk remains one of the biggest threats to most businesses, and industry analysts believe that the proliferation of AI-enabled cyber attacks will only continue to increase with advances in large language models (LLMs).

CIOs and CSOs must modernize their DR programs to account for these potential threats to their most mission-critical applications and data. Syntax can help uncover weaknesses in your present solution, identify cost-effective alternatives for improving recoverability across a variety of scenarios, and build a business case to help fund those improvements.

To learn more about how Syntax can help you maintain strong cyber-resilient disaster recovery, contact us.