By: Chris Mackin, Vice President of Sales
The next 12–18 months will redraw the line between companies that survive a cyber incident and those that don’t. In 2026, “we have backups” will not be a credible answer to a boardroom question. Organizations that can’t afford downtime will move to continuous protection, measurable recovery, and finance-grade disaster-recovery metrics.
Below are six practical predictions—each backed by industry evidence—and what they mean for IT leaders, CFOs, and CEOs.
Prediction #1 — Backup windows will be obsolete: continuous protection becomes standard
Data is created and changed every second. Legacy nightly backups leave hours of transactional data, manufacturing runs, and orders exposed. Industry trends show businesses are already rethinking traditional backup cycles: Veeam’s data protection research highlights accelerating interest in cloud and continuous protection approaches as organizations seek faster recoveries. (Veeam Software)
For executives: continuous or near-real-time protection shrinks your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) from hours to minutes, and that directly reduces lost revenue when an outage hits.
Prediction #2 — Hybrid backup strategies will dominate
Pure cloud-only or pure on-prem approaches no longer cover the full risk picture. The hybrid model—local, fast restores plus cloud-based immutable retention for disaster scenarios—is now mainstream thinking. Veeam’s cloud/hybrid coverage and International Data Corporation’s (IDC) cloud market analysis both document the move toward hybrid, multi-cloud architectures and the need for mixed protection patterns. (Veeam Software)
For executives: hybrid gives you the speed of local recovery and the safety of offsite immutability, making ransomware recovery practical and affordable.
Prediction #3 — Executives will be measured on Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs)--not just “have you backed up?”
Boards will ask a single blunt question: How fast can you be operational after a total outage? That matters because downtime costs are real. Widely quoted industry research shows the average cost of IT downtime can reach roughly $5,600 per minute, and manufacturing outcomes are even larger in many sectors. (Atlassian)
For CFOs and COOs: RTOs become financial metrics. Every minute of improvement in RTO directly reduces lost production, labor overtime, and customer penalties.
Prediction #4 — Automated DR drills will rule: weekly or monthly, not yearly
Manual, once-a-year Disaster Recovery (DR) exercises are not enough. Veeam’s Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery findings show that orchestrated workflows and automated recovery are underused; only a small percentage of organizations use orchestrated recovery today, and that gap explains why many tests fail when they matter most. According to Veeam, “Only 32% of organizations believe that they could recover 50 workloads (which isn’t a large amount) within an entire business week…[and] that only 13% of organizations utilize orchestrated workflow as part of their disaster recovery processes.” Expect organizations to automate and run smaller, more frequent simulations tied to real business KPIs. (Veeam Software)
For IT leaders: automated DR tests validate that your backups work, and that staff and vendors can recover systems under pressure, reducing guesswork and exposure.
Prediction #5 — DR will be owned by CFOs and tied to financial KPIs
CFOs are already being pushed into cyber conversations; guidance for finance leaders now includes explicit disaster-recovery planning as a financial control. As boards seek clearer quantification of operational risk, outage cost-per-hour and time-to-recovery will be tracked alongside cashflow and liquidity. The CFO playbook for 2025 already recommends integrating cyber readiness into financial planning. (CFO.com)
For executive leadership: model outage scenarios in dollars and make DR investments defensible—not just a checkbox.
Prediction #6 — “Last successful test date” will become a board metric
Boards will no longer accept “we have a plan.” They will ask, “when was the last successful, verified restore under simulated outage conditions?” That shift is already reflected in industry research, showing that many organizations cannot verify recoverability when it matters. Veeam and other industry sources report mounting evidence that paying ransom does not guarantee recovery–only 32% of those who paid ransom were able to recover their data in 2024. This reinforces the need for verified restores. (TechRadar)
For business leaders: documenting successful restores is the difference between an insurer accepting a claim and a long, expensive recovery process.
How Ozone helps—turning predictions into operational reality
At Ozone, we don’t sell hope; we make sure your backups and disaster recovery processes work to minimize or eradicate downtime due to cyberattacks. We combine continuous protection architectures, hybrid BaaS, regular orchestrated DR drills, and finance-grade Recovery-Time-Objective (RTO)/Recovery-Point-Objective (RPO) reporting so leaders can answer the board with confidence.
We deliver:
- Continuous & incremental protection for critical workloads (reducing RPO to minutes), leveraging proven platforms and hardened architectures.
- Hybrid backup topologies with immutable cloud retention to stop ransomware from holding you hostage.
- Automated, orchestrated DR testing and verified restore evidence you can show auditors and insurers.
- Financial modeling of downtime so your CFO can see the ROI of recovery improvements.
If you want to prepare for 2026 the right way, start by testing a critical workload this quarter and measure minutes of recoverability—not just whether you “have backups.” Contact me for a resilience-readiness assessment and a verified restore proof-of-concept tailored to your operations.
Chris Mackin is Vice President of Sales at Ozone IT Services with more than 25 years of experience designing and delivering cybersecurity and IT solutions that help organizations reduce risk, protect revenue, and operate with confidence. He is a trusted advisor to business and technology leaders, known for aligning Backup as a Service (BaaS), Patching as a Service (PaaS), and security infrastructure strategies to real-world operational and financial goals.
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