With ever-increasing complexity across hybrid environments, growing regulatory scrutiny, and the rising cost of downtime, legacy IT disaster recovery (IT DR) approaches can no longer keep up with the demands placed on major enterprises. Cutover’s next-generation IT disaster recovery solution, featuring AI-powered runbook automation tools, offers a superior solution for organizations that require rapid and reliable application recovery.
This article will cover how Cutover’s next-generation IT disaster recovery works, encompassing the Cutover Application Metastore, AI-powered runbooks, and automation. We’ll also explore Cutover’s unique approach to DR orchestration, the advantages of using Cutover Recover and examples of how it has benefited our customers.
How Cutover IT disaster recovery works
Cutover Recover, Cutover’s IT disaster recovery software, is a SaaS platform that enables enterprises to simplify complexity, streamline work, and increase visibility via AI-powered automated runbooks that connect teams, technology, and systems. Cutover standardizes and automates global communications in one place, so the right people are engaged at the right time and senior stakeholders are kept informed. Real-time dashboards allow users to monitor the status of work across the organization, identify areas that require immediate attention, and continuously improve internal processes. The platform’s immutable and auto-generated audit log makes regulatory reporting and continuous improvement simple. Cutover also integrates with other tools via REST API to enable seamless recovery and comprehensive visibility.
The three pillars of next-generation disaster recovery
Cutover’s next-generation IT disaster recovery solution is built on three pillars:
- The Cutover Application Metastore
- AI-powered runbooks
- End-to-end automation
Together, they create a dynamic framework that accelerates preparation, execution, and continuous improvement in IT disaster recovery.
The Cutover Application Metastore: Accelerating runbook creation
The Cutover Application Metastore aggregates and provides access to up-to-date application data, including configuration management database (CMDB) data, that can be used to automate the creation of IT disaster recovery runbooks. This reduces IT DR preparation time by 75%, manual effort from runbook creation by 90%, and IT operations event costs by 50%.
Cutover’s unique approach to IT DR runbook creation
The Cutover Application Metastore enables you to generate thousands of tailored runbooks containing application-specific recovery data in seconds. Rather than manually creating IT DR plans using static tools or having to input all your data into your runbooks, the Cutover Application Metastore takes the data you need from across your organization’s tools and uses AI to turn these into a structured, automated runbook. This not only saves time on runbook creation but also improves the accuracy of your IT DR plan creation and maintenance. Runbook templates ensure consistency and governance over the runbook creation process, providing control as well as speed.
AI-powered runbooks: Driving smarter decisions
Cutover AI offers multiple ways to increase efficiency in next-generation IT disaster recovery:
- AI Create generates recovery runbooks in seconds based on structured and unstructured data, vastly reducing the amount of time needed for runbook creation
- AI Suggest provides intelligent suggestions to improve the structure and efficiency of your runbooks
- AI Summarize rapidly generates a description of each runbook and its purpose and contents, making it easy for users to quickly understand a runbook at a glance
- AI agents can be incorporated into your recovery runbook to autonomously carry out tasks, freeing up users from having to manage these tasks manually without losing human oversight of what the agent is doing and how those decisions are being made by the AI
Combining AI and IT disaster recovery increases the speed and accuracy of your recovery efforts, enabling you to reap the efficiency benefits of AI without losing oversight and control.
Automation: Speed and precision
Automation reduces human error and speeds up recovery times. By reducing manual inputs and tasks, next-generation IT disaster recovery automation improves speed and accuracy, allowing organizations to recover faster and with greater confidence during high-pressure scenarios. Cutover Recover supports task automation and communication automation via automated runbooks.
Cutover gives enterprises the confidence to recover from outages with dynamic, AI-powered automated runbooks. Users can rehearse their recovery strategies and create a governance framework with visibility into real-time analytics and immutable regulatory audit trails.
Cutover Recover also integrates across the recovery tech stack with other tools such as the ITSM, BCM, infra as code tools, monitoring systems, and mass communications tools, enabling teams to manage the process all in one place.
Benefits of using Cutover for IT disaster recovery
Cutover Recover has been used by major organizations, including some of the top financial services companies such as Danske Bank and Close Brothers, to improve and modernize their IT disaster recovery planning and execution. This has led to benefits including:
- 50% reduction in execution time
- 60% less audit prep time needed
- 70% reduction in planning and testing
Real-world applications and success stories
Danske Bank improved its resilience efficiency by 300% using Cutover Recover.
The problem
Danske Bank’s IT resilience team needed a more effective way to manage resilience activities, due to increasing regulatory scrutiny and the need to reduce the risk of incidents. One area that needed improvement was data center recovery testing, which was mainly being run using spreadsheets and Confluence. This method only allowed the bank to shut down 130 services over 10 hours.
The solution
Using Cutover, the team orchestrated two large tests. For the first, they converted existing failover plans into a Cutover runbook containing 3,000 tasks. For the second, they took a different approach, uploading individual plans for each database service owner. Each owner could check on the progress of their team leading up to the event, and on the day of the event, the resilience team merged all of these plans into a large runbook so they could manage the event as a whole. During the second test, they were able to cut down on time and effort, making sure the plan was correct and had been verified by all involved stakeholders. They were able to map the entire event in one runbook and see the entire process for that day, from start to finish, in one consistent view. Using Cutover also gave them the ability to dedicate resources at the right time, reducing waste.
The results
Cutover Recover enabled Danske Bank to:
- Easily view and map resilience dependencies
- Rehearse resilience tests
- View status via operational resilience dashboards
- Automatically generate an immutable audit trail
- Improve resilience efficiency by 300%
- Failover 400 services in 14 hours
Find out more about next-generation IT disaster recovery with Cutover Recover.