Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2026. Read them in this 18th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Margaret Hoagland, VP of Global Sales and Marketing, SIOS Technology
Disaster recovery (DR) is entering a new era driven by intelligent automation, continuous validation, and deep visibility across hybrid and multicloud environments. As organizations modernize and cyber risks grow, the traditional reactive approach is insufficient. In 2026, automation will become an operational necessity, transforming how IT teams prepare for, respond to, and prevent disruptions.
For decades, DR has relied heavily on human-driven workflows: scripted failover steps, handcrafted runbooks, and a mix of tools that rarely communicate with one another. But modern application stacks span on-premises environments, containers, virtual machines, cloud services, and third-party APIs. When outages occur, whether due to hardware failure, misconfiguration, ransomware, or a routine patch gone wrong, manual processes are too slow and too error-prone. By 2026, IT teams will expect DR solutions to automate everything from verifying replication health to orchestrating site-level failover and validating that the application stack has resumed regular operation.
Automation alone, however, is not enough. As part of this broader shift, organizations will also demand full-stack visibility into their DR environments. In distributed architectures, a failover event is rarely tied to a single point of failure. Networking, storage I/O, routing policies, cloud infrastructure limits, misaligned patches, or subtle dependency failures can all trigger or complicate recovery. In 2026, DR teams will require tools that map and monitor the entire application ecosystem-showing how each component behaves during replication, failover, and regular operation. This level of insight will enable teams not only to execute automated recovery but also to understand how resilient their systems truly are at any given moment.
Another force accelerating the move toward automated DR is the growing intersection between disaster recovery and cybersecurity. Organizations can no longer treat these as separate disciplines. Cyber incidents now represent some of the most frequent and most damaging causes of downtime, and manual recovery in these high-pressure moments can slow response times and increase risk. In 2026, automated DR will become a cornerstone of cyber resilience. IT teams will rely on clustering and failover technologies to quickly apply patches, isolate compromised systems, restore clean replicas, and maintain business continuity even while investigations are underway. Frequent DR testing, driven by cyber insurance requirements and compliance mandates, will also become more automated, replacing labor-intensive rehearsals with continuous validation.
Hybrid and multicloud strategies will further fuel the need for DR automation. As workloads are distributed across cloud providers and geographic regions, DR cannot be centralized at a single secondary site. IT teams need the flexibility to fail over between regions, between clouds, and sometimes even between architectures. Automated DR frameworks will allow organizations to coordinate recovery across these disparate environments while maintaining consistent policies and outcomes. The result will be DR operations that scale with the organization’s infrastructure, rather than requiring custom engineering each time a new platform or service is introduced.
The shift toward automated DR will redefine the IT administrator’s role. Automation won’t eliminate oversight but will transform DR specialists into strategic resilience engineers. Instead of manual recovery, they’ll focus on designing policies, setting validation criteria, and monitoring system health-activities that proactively anticipate failures and strengthen overall resilience.
Ultimately, the growing need for automated disaster recovery reflects a larger shift in how organizations view resilience. Outages are no longer rare, predictable events; they are constant, multifaceted risks that require fast, reliable, and repeatable responses. In 2026, DR will evolve from a reactive backstop to an integrated, always-on capability powered by automation, visibility, and seamless orchestration across complex environments.
Automated DR is no longer a future goal. It is becoming the foundation of resilience, and the organizations that embrace it will be the ones best prepared for the uncertainty ahead.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Margaret Hoagland, VP, Global Sales & Marketing, SIOS Technology
Margaret Hoagland, VP of Global Sales and Marketing, is responsible for leading SIOS Technology Corp.’s sales strategy and manages the execution of the full range of corporate, product, and marketing communications programs that support the adoption and utilization of SIOS solutions. Margaret brings to her role more than 30 years of marketing experience including 15 years of experience in the high availability space. Margaret earned a Master’s of Science in Communications Management from Simmons College and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston College.
