By Gerald Baldino Let’s face it: disaster recovery isn’t always an easy or exciting sell. Similar to insurance, DR is a cost center, meaning it won’t directly generate profits or deliver immediate – or any – ROI for your customers. As a result, businesses may resist DR, at least until an event makes their website, application or data unavailable. DR remains a foundational business need and a core part of risk management. It provides the operational backbone that businesses need to remain up and running in today’s unpredictable world. Reframing DR as a key aspect of digital transformation can help customers think differently about the technology and shift the conversation from cost to a necessity. But a DR gap persists, and partners can help close it. According to a Nationwide study, nearly a third of SMBs and 45 percent of mid-market companies still lack disaster preparedness. Most respondents in the study prioritized risks such as economic downturns and supply chain disruptions over cybersecurity and natural disasters, revealing a major disconnect with the current threat landscape. Surprisingly, many businesses today still rely on risk management strategies from a decade ago, when the threat landscape was far simpler. Without a reliable recovery strategy, organizations are at risk from a variety of threats. For example, companies today face heightened risk from fire, floods, storms and earthquakes. Cybercrime is now also a major operational threat, especially emerging AI-powered attacks which allow threat actors to act with greater speed and precision. In a 2025 cybersecurity report from Darktrace, 78 percent of respondents saw AI-powered threats as significant, which is up from just 5 percent in 2024. Equally alarming, just 42 percent said they fully understand the types of AI in their security stack. “The impact of AI on cybersecurity is clear and increasing,” explained Darktrace CEO Jill Popelka. “There are more employees and enterprise applications using AI that must be protected. Conversation Disaster recovery can be a powerful revenue generator – if positioned right EDGE TO CLOUD 36 CHANNELVISION | MARCH - APRIL 2025 Changing the DR By the numbers: DR 100% …surveyed executives who reported experiencing outage-related revenue loss in the last year (Cockroach Labs) 70% …the amount of ransomware attacks that result in data encryption (Sophos) $182.7 billion …the total cost of weather and climate disasters in 2024 (NOAA)
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