Manufacturing organizations, both in the United States and overseas, operate at an intersection of traditional processes and cutting-edge digital technologies. It is not uncommon for manufacturers to simultaneously navigate legacy systems – some decades old – intertwined with modern cloud infrastructure and emerging industry 4.0 technologies. It’s an environment where a single point of failure can halt entire production lines, disrupt supply chains and generate losses measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per minute, argue researchers at NewtonX. In this era where manufacturing operations are increasingly digitized and interconnected, the ability to protect and rapidly recover critical information has evolved from a technical concern to a strategic business imperative. Yet despite widespread investment in multiple backup and recovery platforms, “tool fragmentation is leading to a ‘recovery gap’ across manufacturing environments, costing businesses upwards of $100,000 per hour in downtime,” said analysts at the B2B market research firm. In turn, surveys of IT and operational technology (OT) decision makers at manufacturing organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom – performed by NewtonX for backup and recovery company Macrium Software – found that the vast majority of manufacturers are increasing backup investment, with nearly threequarters planning budget growth. On average, these decisions makers expect an increase of 12 percent this year in backup and recovery spending. Unlike other sectors focused primarily on traditional IT infrastructure, manufacturing must safeguard diverse and interdependent systems spanning both IT and OT, NewtonX researchers pointed out. ERP systems, manufacturing execution systems, SCADA platforms and programmable logic controllers all generate mission-critical data while simultaneously controlling physical production processes. These hybrid environments create unique challenges for implementing comprehensive backup and recovery strategies that accommodate proprietary protocols, real-time operational requirements and distributed manufacturing sites, they continued. As a reaction to this reality, manufacturing organizations operate highly fragmented and complex backup environments, showed the NewtonX findings. Three-quarters of respondents, for example, employ hybrid backup approaches combining cloud and on-premises By Martin Vilaboy Complex environments push demand for disaster recovery among U.S. manufacturers Building Resiliency CHANNELVISION | SPRING 2026 CORE COMMUNICATIONS 38
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