The CIO's New Recovery Problem: Knowing What 'Good' Looks Like
CIO, Wednesday, October 21st, 2026
A CIO argues that complexity sprawl means recovery must restore a trustworthy known-good state, not just bring systems back online.
Disaster recovery used to focus on how fast the business could get back online.
This CIO-authored piece argues that hybrid, cloud and SaaS estates, constantly changing identities, shadow tools and AI have created "complexity sprawl" that makes it hard to know what normal even looks like.
After an incident, a restored system may still carry a compromised identity, a changed configuration, an attacker's backdoor or a dependency that has shifted since the last test.
The author says CIOs need confidence that what they bring back can be trusted, which requires a clear baseline of what exists and how it connects, not just faster restores.