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11/07/2026 8:35 pm
TL;DR: Disaster recovery now includes downtime, regulatory fines, lost business, and reputation damage, with the global cost of disasters exceeding $2.3 trillion annually when indirect costs are included, according to Secureframe citing the 2025 Global Assessment Report and IBM’s 2025 breach data. The real financial model has shifted from recovery expense to resilience governance: organisations that can’t test, classify, and fund recovery early pay for it later under pressure.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Secureframe: The Real Cost of Disaster Recovery in 2026 and Why Unplanned Recovery Is So Expensive
By the numbers:
- Average breach costs reached $4.4 million globally, with 86% of organizations experiencing operational disruption.
- U.S. breach costs climbed to a record $10.22 million, driven by higher regulatory fines and escalation costs.
- 48% of organizations that suffered a breach paid $100,000 or more in regulatory fines.
Questions worth separating out
Q: What makes disaster recovery more expensive than the obvious repair bill?
A: The repair bill is only the direct cost.
Q: When should organisations prioritise recovery planning over buying more point-in-time fixes?
A: Organisations should prioritise recovery planning when service interruptions would affect revenue, regulated data, customer trust, or privileged access.
Q: What breaks when disaster recovery plans are not tested in real conditions?
A: Untested plans usually break at the seams between systems, people, and credentials.
Practitioner guidance
- Define recovery objectives by service tier Set explicit RTO and RPO targets for each critical service, including the identity and access components that must come back first during failover.
- Test privileged access during failover Run recovery exercises that verify emergency admin access, service account availability, and secret retrieval in the same scenario as the application restore.
- Map recovery controls to compliance requirements Tie continuity, backup, and incident-response procedures to the controls in NIST SP 800-53, ISO 27001, DORA, and NIS2 so testing, logging, and ownership are auditable.
What's in the full article
Secureframe's full blog covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- The article’s cost breakdown by direct and indirect loss categories, including where recurring outage spend shows up in budgets.
- Vendor examples for DRaaS and cloud-based recovery pricing, useful if you are comparing subscription and consumption models.
- The article’s framework mapping across NIST 800-53, ISO 27001, HIPAA, SOC 2, DORA, and NIS2.
- The planning template and compliance discussion that support a more detailed internal business case.
👉 Read Secureframe's analysis of the real cost of disaster recovery in 2026 →
Disaster recovery costs in 2026: what do practitioners need to budget for?
Explore further
11/07/2026 9:05 pm
Recovery cost is now an identity and governance problem, not just an infrastructure problem. When outage response depends on who can approve access, which credentials still work, and whether service accounts survive failover, recovery time becomes an access-management issue. That makes IAM, PAM, and NHI governance part of resilience design, not a separate control lane. Organisations should treat recovery readiness as an identity continuity requirement.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Which frameworks make disaster recovery an accountability issue?
A: NIST SP 800-53, ISO 27001, HIPAA, SOC 2, DORA, and NIS2 all treat resilience as a governed obligation rather than optional hygiene. They require organisations to document, test, and evidence continuity measures, which turns disaster recovery into an accountability and audit problem as well as a technical one.
👉 Read our full editorial: Disaster recovery costs in 2026 show why resilience is cheaper
