Why Enterprise CIOs Are Rethinking Application Resilience

With downtime costing $6.48M per hour and new DORA regulations enforcing resilience standards, enterprises are rethinking protection strategies. InfoScale's 1,700+ customers report 98% downtime reduction and 320,000 IT hours saved annually through real-time application resilience.

At the 66th IT Press Tour, InfoScale presented a case for rethinking how enterprises protect their applications. The numbers suggest they're on to something important.

The Downtime Problem Is Getting Worse

Here's what the data shows: 59% of Fortune 500 companies experience 1.6 hours of unexpected downtime per week. That's 83 hours per year of systems being offline when they shouldn't be. For financial services, each 24-hour period of mission-critical application downtime costs $163 million.

Add in the new regulatory environment. The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) started enforcement in January 2025. Financial services organizations now face fines for not implementing proper resilience standards. The question isn't whether to invest in resilience—it's how to do it effectively.

Why Traditional Approaches Don't Scale

Bruce Scheibe, InfoScale's Global Head of Sales, explained the core problem: most enterprises have over 1,000 applications running across different platforms, with 50% being mission-critical. These applications run on everything from VMware to Kubernetes, Oracle to SQL Server, on-premises data centers to multiple clouds.

Traditional resilience approaches handle infrastructure well. They protect servers, storage, and networks. But they miss what matters most—the applications. When an application fails, you need to understand the entire stack: the application itself, its data, the infrastructure it runs on, and the dependencies between them.

InfoScale reports that most downtime comes from routine operational changes: patching, scaling, and upgrades. These aren't infrastructure failures—they're operational complexity creating risk.

What InfoScale Does Differently

InfoScale provides what CEO Tom Krause calls "real-time resilience for any app, anywhere." The platform sits between applications and infrastructure, protecting the entire stack.

Here's what that means in practice:

Application-level protection. InfoScale understands applications, not just infrastructure. It knows what Oracle, SAP, and SQL Server need to maintain consistency. When something fails, it recovers the application, not just the infrastructure.

Platform independence. The platform works across 1,000+ storage targets, multiple clouds, various hypervisors, and different operating systems. You don't have to standardize your entire environment to get consistent resilience.

Real-time operation. InfoScale detects and responds to failures in real-time. The company reports recovery times under 60 seconds for containerized applications and average downtime reduction from 4 hours to 5 minutes.

Full-stack visibility. The platform monitors applications, data, infrastructure, and services. This eliminates the blind spots that come from using different tools for each layer.

Customer Results

InfoScale serves 1,700+ enterprise customers including:

• 9 of 10 largest energy companies

• 10 of 10 largest telecom companies

• 10 of 10 largest financial services companies

• 9 of 10 largest pharmaceutical companies

These organizations report:

• 98% reduction in downtime

• 320,000 IT hours saved per year on downtime support

• Near-zero recovery point objectives (RPO)

• Near-zero recovery time objectives (RTO)

One financial services customer reduced their recovery time from hours to minutes. A telecommunications provider automated 100% of their failure response across data, infrastructure, and application layers.

The Cyber Resilience Advantage

Ransomware recovery takes an average of 24 days. InfoScale addresses this with secure snapshots and WORM (write once, read many) storage. When ransomware hits, you can roll back to a clean state.

The platform maintains multiple recovery points and validates data integrity throughout the process. This matters when 96% of cyber incidents achieve partial success in 74% of cases. The question isn't if you'll face a breach, but when—and how quickly you can recover.

Modernization Without Disruption

Many enterprises are moving workloads to containers and cloud platforms. InfoScale enables this without forcing a big-bang migration.

The platform provides sequencing for complex application dependencies and rehearsals for migration testing. You can validate procedures without disrupting production. Once you're ready, InfoScale enables non-disruptive migration between on-premises and cloud environments.

This approach reduces risk. You don't have to bet the business on a single migration weekend. Test, validate, and move workloads when you're confident they'll work.

DORA Compliance Made Simpler

The Digital Operational Resilience Act requires financial services organizations to demonstrate application and infrastructure resilience. InfoScale helps with the reporting and audit capabilities needed for compliance.

The platform tracks resilience metrics, recovery times, and test results. It provides the documentation auditors need to verify you're meeting requirements. This matters when fines can reach millions of dollars for non-compliance.

The AI Direction

InfoScale is developing autonomous resilience features:

• Infrastructure failure forecasting with predictive analytics

• Intelligent workload optimization based on learned I/O patterns

• Optimal recovery planning with adaptive redundancy models

• Predictive failure scenarios with automated stress testing

• Application-aware operations with learned behavior

• Proactive threat protection with attack simulations

These capabilities aim to reduce manual intervention and predict problems before they cause downtime. The technology is still in development, but the direction is clear: move from reactive to predictive resilience.

What This Means for IT Leaders

For CIOs and IT directors, InfoScale addresses several strategic challenges:

Reducing operational complexity. Managing different resilience solutions for different platforms creates overhead. InfoScale provides a consistent approach across your entire environment.

Improving service levels. When downtime costs millions per hour, reducing recovery time from hours to minutes has measurable financial impact.

Meeting compliance requirements. DORA and similar regulations require documented resilience capabilities. InfoScale provides the reporting infrastructure for compliance.

Enabling cloud strategy. Moving workloads to cloud platforms requires resilience that works across hybrid environments. InfoScale supports this without forcing complete standardization.

Reducing risk. Automated fire drills test recovery procedures regularly. You know your resilience works before you need it.

Investment Considerations

InfoScale uses subscription licensing based on protected instances. The cost varies by platform, edition, and support level.

The ROI calculation includes:

• Downtime costs avoided

• IT hours saved on manual recovery operations

• Reduced regulatory risk

• Faster time to market for new applications

• Consolidated tooling across multiple resilience functions

For financial services, where downtime costs $6.48 million per hour, the break-even point comes quickly. A single avoided outage can justify the annual subscription cost.

Implementation Reality

InfoScale isn't a turnkey solution. Implementation requires planning, configuration, and testing. You need to understand application dependencies, define resilience policies, and validate recovery procedures.

The company recommends starting with your most critical applications. Define your RPO and RTO requirements, configure InfoScale to meet them, then expand coverage as you validate the approach.

Most enterprises deploy InfoScale in phases over 6-18 months. This spreads the cost and risk while delivering value incrementally.

The Cloud Software Group Connection

Cloud Software Group acquired InfoScale (formerly Veritas InfoScale) in 2024. Tom Krause, CEO of Cloud Software Group, explained the rationale: "InfoScale provides unmatched data resiliency for the world's most demanding enterprises, protecting vital revenue streams with a 99.999% uptime guarantee that spans the entire hybrid multi-cloud stack."

The acquisition gives InfoScale access to Cloud Software Group's broader portfolio and customer base. For customers, it provides confidence that InfoScale will continue to invest in the platform.

Competitive Landscape

Several vendors offer resilience solutions:

• VMware Site Recovery Manager focuses on VMware environments

• Zerto specializes in disaster recovery

• Veeam provides backup and recovery

• Cloud providers offer native resilience services

InfoScale differentiates through platform independence and application-level awareness. You can protect Oracle on physical servers, SAP on VMware, and containerized applications on Kubernetes with a single platform.

When InfoScale Makes Sense

InfoScale is designed for enterprises with:

• Multiple mission-critical applications across different platforms

• Hybrid cloud environments requiring consistent resilience

• Stringent RPO and RTO requirements (minutes, not hours)

• Compliance requirements for documented resilience

• Complex application dependencies requiring orchestrated recovery

The platform is less relevant for:

• Single-platform environments where native solutions work well

• Organizations with lenient downtime tolerance

• Small businesses without mission-critical applications

• Pure cloud deployments using only managed services

Bottom Line

InfoScale solves a real problem: keeping applications running across increasingly complex infrastructure. The company has 30+ years of experience protecting enterprise applications, now backed by Cloud Software Group's resources.

The platform's value comes from working across your existing infrastructure without requiring rearchitecture. For organizations where downtime costs millions per hour, InfoScale's real-time detection and automated response deliver measurable ROI.

The technology isn't simple to implement, but neither is the problem it solves. Enterprise resilience requires understanding applications, data, and infrastructure as an integrated system. InfoScale provides that view.

For IT leaders facing DORA compliance, managing hybrid cloud complexity, or reducing operational risk, InfoScale offers a proven platform with a strong customer base. The 1,700+ enterprise customers and 98% downtime reduction results suggest the approach works.