The Total Economic Impact™ Of Cutover Recover

Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By Cutover Recover

A Forrester Total Economic Impact Study Commissioned By Cutover, October 2024

Disaster recovery, including cyber recovery, has become a strategic priority across enterprises due to the increasing frequency and severity of disruptions. However, many businesses lag in preparedness, with less than 40% feeling well prepared for a disaster.1 Automating and streamlining disaster recovery processes to recover applications is key to ensuring business continuity in the face of disruption and enhancing overall resiliency.

Cutover Recover, an IT disaster recovery (DR) solution, automates and streamlines disaster recovery processes with dynamic runbooks while keeping people in the process for decision-making. It enhances resilience by integrating recovery plans across cloud-native, hybrid, on-premises, and multicloud environments, ensuring regulatory compliance and minimizing downtime. Cutover also provides real-time visibility and coordination, enabling teams to execute recovery plans efficiently and effectively.

Cutover commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Cutover Recover.2 The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Cutover Recover on their organizations.

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Return on investment (ROI)

313%

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Net present value (NPV)

$2.40M

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To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed four representatives with experience using Cutover Recover. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization that is a retail organization with 2 million customers and revenues of $1 billion per year.

Interviewees said that prior to using Cutover Recover, their organizations were unable to do large-scale failover tests; were limited in how many single-application IT DR tests they could run; were struggling to meet customers’ and regulators’ requirements; and had little confidence in their ability to execute during a live recovery. However, prior attempts to improve DR processes yielded limited success, leaving them with manual processes that were time-consuming to run, highly error-prone, and not repeatable. They lacked visibility into the progress and ownership of test execution and a clear audit trail. These limitations led to DR tests either not being run successfully or only addressing portions of the technology stack — or longer outages that affected their services.

After the investment in Cutover Recover, the interviewees were able to run more, larger-scale tests, have better visibility into and oversight of the tests, and execute them at lower risk, which built up their confidence to execute successfully. Key results from the investment included a reduction in planning and execution time for IT DR tests and an increase in audit and post-test analysis efficiency.

Key Findings

Quantified benefits. Three-year, risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits for the composite organization include:

  • A reduction in planning time for IT DR tests. The use of Cutover Recover reduces the planning time for IT DR tests by allowing employees involved in a disaster recovery effort to directly add their steps to the tool, enabling them to work simultaneously on the same runbook. This eliminates the need for excessive communication with the key IT DR team, as they can review everything in one place. The increased visibility that Cutover runbooks provide results in fewer preparation and planning meetings. Overall, this leads to recaptured productivity amounting to $188,000 over three years.
  • A reduction in execution time of 50%. The use of Cutover Recover reduces the execution time of a DR effort by increasing visibility and enabling all employees involved to react more quickly. Communication time also decreases significantly, as users can easily share screenshots or grant access to the Cutover platform to senior stakeholders. With the process clearly outlined in the runbook and real-time updates, employees can accurately predict their task execution time, reducing their overall involvement. The time and cost savings amount to $3 million for the composite organization over three years.
  • A reduction in audit and post-test analysis time of 80%. The use of Cutover Recover increases the efficiency of audit and post-test analysis for IT DR. The ability to pull a detailed read-only log of all activities during a test or event eliminates the need to collect data from multiple sources and increases trust and credibility with regulators. The availability of a chat log for each task within Cutover allows users to more easily review the notes related to any issues they encounter. Over three years, the composite organization recognizes savings of $31,000.

Unquantified benefits. Benefits that provide value for the composite organization but are not quantified for this study include:

  • Improved employee experience. The accuracy that Cutover Recover runbooks provide increases the predictability of when each employee needs to join and execute a task, reducing the time each employee needs to be involved during a test; this has a positive impact on their work/life balance.
  • Increased credibility and trust. The improved execution of DR events and the transparent official reporting creates more credibility and trust in the DR team.
  • Reduced complexity. The Cutover Recover platform is easy and intuitive to use, requiring only minimal training. The increased visibility increases accountability for tasks and improves collaboration.

Costs. Three-year, risk-adjusted PV costs for the composite organization include:

  • Software subscription fees. Cutover Recover is priced per monthly active user. Users in this case are mainly technology professionals involved in IT disaster recovery. License fees for 400 users at the composite organization total $619,000 distributed over three years.
  • Integration and license costs. Cutover integrates its solution with multiple different systems, including single-sign on (SSO), collaboration, IT service management (ITSM), and automation. The integration with SSO and the yearly license fees for the composite organization amount to $23,000 over three years.
  • Implementation, onboarding, and ongoing management costs. The implementation of Cutover Recover requires efforts mostly in change management and creating runbooks in the platform; this takes three months. Ongoing management is minimal, as the platform is very user-friendly and intuitive to use. Implementation, onboarding, and ongoing management costs for the composite organization amount to $127,000 over three years.

The representative interviews and financial analysis found that a composite organization experiences benefits of $3.17 million over three years versus costs of $769,000, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $2.4 million and an ROI of 313%.

“I think Cutover is great. I’ve been a real advocate for it myself. I think the control and visibility that it gives you of those complex events has been really valuable to us. I’m totally sold on its value to us.”

Head of IT service assurance, financial services

“We were using spreadsheets for full-scale testing, but we could not go beyond a certain number of apps. It was just too much of a manual process and too prone to mistakes. Bringing in Cutover helped automate workflows [and] reduced our prep time, and we have now doubled the number of apps we are testing.”

Senior manager, infrastructure services — disaster recovery, financial services

Key Statistics

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    Return on investment (ROI)

    313%
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    Benefits PV

    $3.17M
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    Net present value (NPV)

    $2.40M
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    Payback

    <6 months
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Benefits (Three-Year)

Reduction in planning time for IT DR test Improved IT DR test execution efficiency Increase in audit post-test analysis efficiency for IT DR tests

TEI Framework And Methodology

From the information provided in the interviews, Forrester constructed a Total Economic Impact™ framework for those organizations considering an investment in Cutover Recover.

The objective of the framework is to identify the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the investment decision. Forrester took a multistep approach to evaluate the impact that Cutover Recover can have on an organization.

  1. Due Diligence

    Interviewed Cutover stakeholders and Forrester analysts to gather data relative to Cutover Recover.

  2. Interviews

    Interviewed four representatives at organizations using Cutover Recover to obtain data about costs, benefits, and risks.

  3. Composite Organization

    Designed a composite organization based on characteristics of the interviewees’ organizations.

  4. Financial Model Framework

    Constructed a financial model representative of the interviews using the TEI methodology and risk-adjusted the financial model based on issues and concerns of the interviewees.

  5. Case Study

    Employed four fundamental elements of TEI in modeling the investment impact: benefits, costs, flexibility, and risks. Given the increasing sophistication of ROI analyses related to IT investments, Forrester’s TEI methodology provides a complete picture of the total economic impact of purchase decisions. Please see Appendix A for additional information on the TEI methodology.

Disclosures

Readers should be aware of the following:

This study is commissioned by Cutover and delivered by Forrester Consulting. It is not meant to be used as a competitive analysis.

Forrester makes no assumptions as to the potential ROI that other organizations will receive. Forrester strongly advises that readers use their own estimates within the framework provided in the study to determine the appropriateness of an investment in Cutover Recover.

Cutover reviewed and provided feedback to Forrester, but Forrester maintains editorial control over the study and its findings and does not accept changes to the study that contradict Forrester’s findings or obscure the meaning of the study.

Cutover provided the customer names for the interviews but did not participate in the interviews.

Consulting Team:

Antonie Bassi

Elina Bauwens

M
K

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