8 hours ago
Data from the Macrium Current State of Backup & Recovery in Manufacturing 2026 Benchmark Report highlights a growing gap between backup deployment and real recovery readiness. While most manufacturers have adopted modern backup architectures, operational resilience remains uneven. Around 75% rely on hybrid backup strategies combining cloud and on-premise infrastructure, yet only 18% meet recovery time objectives during testing, suggesting many recovery targets remain theoretical rather than validated.
Protection priorities also remain heavily weighted toward enterprise IT workloads. Databases, cloud platforms, servers, and ERP systems receive the most consistent backup coverage. At the same time, operational technology environments such as ICS and SCADA are backed up by only about 54% of organizations, even though they are at the core of manufacturing operations. Backup environments are also fragmented, with 64% of organizations using two to three backup tools and another 26% using four or more.
Downtime patterns reinforce the need for stronger recovery capabilities. Most outages originate from internal operational failures, including maintenance errors and configuration changes. While 55% of manufacturers report experiencing ransomware incidents, the larger operational challenge remains restoring production quickly. Three-quarters of organizations require more than two hours to recover systems, delays that can translate into significant financial losses in production environments.
In the following conversation, Industrial Cyber speaks with Macrium about the practical implications of the benchmark report and the findings it reveals about operational resilience in manufacturing environments. The discussion explores the persistent gap between backup deployment and proven recovery readiness, examining why manufacturers continue to struggle with validating recovery performance despite widespread investment in protection technologies. It also looks at the operational realities behind the data, including the structural differences between IT and OT recovery, the complexity of legacy industrial systems, and the governance challenges that continue to slow progress toward reliable recovery in production environments.
The research suggests many manufacturers have invested heavily in backup technologies, yet only a small portion meet their recovery time objectives during real recovery tests. Why does this gap between backup deployment and proven recovery performance persist in manufacturing environments, and what steps should organizations take to ensure their systems can actually be restored during operational disruptions?
Macrium: Several factors help explain why the gap between backup deployment and recovery readiness persists in manufacturing environments. Many organizations have invested heavily in backup tools, but they have not invested equally in validating recovery in production environments. In many cases, backup success is measured by whether scheduled backup jobs complete successfully rather than by whether systems can actually be restored when needed.
Recovery time objectives are frequently defined during planning exercises but are rarely pressure-tested through full recovery drills. As a result, organizations may assume their recovery targets are achievable without verifying them in practice. This disconnect between planning and validation can leave recovery capabilities largely unproven.
Manufacturing environments add further constraints, including legacy systems, specialized hardware, and air-gapped networks, but the root issue remains one of validation rather than technology.
The key point is that recovery readiness is not simply about having backups in place. It depends on proving that systems can actually be restored within the operational constraints of a manufacturing environment.
Industrial Cyber: Many organizations monitor backup activity regularly but conduct full disaster recovery tests only occasionally. The benchmark also shows that while most organizations track recovery metrics, only about 25% track recovery test frequency. Why is recovery testing still so infrequent, and what tends to prevent organizations from testing their recovery capabilities more rigorously?
Macrium: Recovery testing remains relatively infrequent in many manufacturing environments for several practical and organizational reasons. Production systems often operate continuously, making it difficult to take critical infrastructure offline for testing without risking operational disruption. As a result, many teams hesitate to conduct full recovery exercises for fear that testing could interfere with live production processes.
Testing is also frequently viewed as complex and potentially risky. Recovery procedures may involve multiple interdependent systems, specialized hardware configurations, and tightly sequenced restoration steps. Coordinating these exercises across teams and production schedules can therefore appear complex.
Organizational factors further complicate recovery testing. Responsibility for backup and recovery is often fragmented between IT and OT teams, which can make ownership of testing programs unclear. In many cases, organizations rely on backup integrity checks or monitoring backup completion rates rather than performing full restoration drills. While these checks confirm that backup data exists, they do not verify that systems can actually be restored successfully during a real incident.
As a result, organizations develop false confidence in backup systems. Integrity checks confirm that a backup file exists, but do not confirm that a system will restore successfully. Confidence in backup systems should come from validated restores, including simple test restores and regular disaster recovery exercises conducted under conditions that closely match their operational setup.
One of the most striking findings is the gap between recovery plans and actual performance during tests. With nearly three-quarters of manufacturers experiencing downtime at least annually, recovery speed becomes a critical operational requirement. Why do so many organizations struggle to meet their recovery time objectives during real recovery exercises?
Organizations often miss their recovery time objectives because of infrastructure limitations, such as limited bandwidth, storage bottlenecks, or the availability of compatible hardware, which slow restoration efforts, while manual recovery procedures frequently add further delays.
When organizations conduct full restore drills, they often uncover issues that were not visible during planning. Recovery processes typically take longer than expected once all operational steps are executed. Some systems fail to restore cleanly, particularly when legacy software or specialized configurations are involved. Hardware compatibility issues may also arise when older systems are restored to different or newer equipment. Undocumented dependencies between systems can further delay recovery by forcing teams to adjust restoration sequences.
These exercises show that the gap between recovery plans and actual performance becomes visible only when organizations conduct realistic recovery testing. Without such validation, recovery assumptions remain largely theoretical and may not hold up during a real operational disruption.
When an OT system fails in a production environment, what does recovery actually look like in practice? How different is restoring a plant system compared with restoring typical enterprise IT workloads?
Restoring enterprise IT workloads is generally a predictable process. Virtual machines can be rebuilt, applications reinstalled, and data restored using well-established procedures and mature tools. In contrast, operational technology environments are often far more complex to recover because they include legacy operating systems, specialized industrial hardware, and proprietary software designed for tightly controlled production environments. Many of these systems operate on offline or air-gapped networks and cannot easily be rebuilt using standard IT methods.
In practice, OT recovery frequently requires restoring entire system images rather than individual files. Systems may also need to be restored onto dissimilar hardware when the original equipment is no longer available, which can introduce driver compatibility issues or configuration challenges. Recovery must often be carefully sequenced to ensure that critical production systems come back online safely and in the correct order, particularly when multiple interdependent processes are involved.
For this reason, recovery planning in industrial environments must account for the exact conditions in which systems operate. Effective recovery strategies are grounded in the realities of the production environment rather than in idealized architectures that assume modern infrastructure, standardized platforms, or easily replaceable hardware.
The benchmark indicates that recovery leadership still sits primarily with IT teams in many organizations, with 47% reporting IT leadership ownership and another 39% using joint IT/OT coordination teams. What risks does this create, and what does effective collaboration between IT and OT teams look like when recovery plans are executed?
Recovery responsibility often sits with IT teams, even when the systems involved directly support operational processes. This arrangement can introduce several risks. IT teams may not fully understand the operational dependencies that exist across production systems, while OT teams may have limited involvement in recovery planning. As a result, the order in which systems are restored may not reflect the priorities required to restart production efficiently.
At the same time, greater IT ownership can have a positive effect by exposing recovery gaps that might otherwise remain hidden. In enterprise IT environments, reliable backup and recovery capabilities are standard operating practice, and IT teams tend to apply the same expectations when they enter OT environments. This often reveals weaknesses that had not been fully examined before, such as incomplete system inventories, undocumented dependencies between production systems, or recovery procedures that have never been tested under operational conditions.
Effective collaboration between IT and OT teams is essential for improving recovery readiness. This typically involves shared ownership of recovery plans, clearly defined restoration sequencing that reflects operational priorities, and joint recovery testing exercises. Involving operational stakeholders in the validation process helps ensure that recovery procedures align with real production requirements. When IT and OT teams plan and test recovery together, organizations are far better positioned to restore systems quickly and safely after disruptions.
Legacy infrastructure appears as the biggest barrier to improving backup and recovery capabilities. What specific characteristics of legacy industrial systems make them difficult to protect and recover?
Legacy infrastructure creates significant challenges for backup and recovery in industrial environments. Many manufacturing systems run on unsupported operating systems and offer limited options for patching or upgrading. These systems are often tied to fixed hardware configurations, where specific controllers, interfaces, or devices must remain in place for the software to function correctly. Industrial equipment also follows long replacement cycles, meaning systems may remain in service for many years or even decades.
These characteristics make traditional cloud-centric backup strategies difficult to apply. Approaches designed for modern IT environments often assume standardized platforms, regular system updates, and easily replaceable hardware. In manufacturing environments, those assumptions rarely hold, which complicates both backup implementation and recovery planning.
Organizations therefore need recovery strategies designed to work within the constraints of legacy infrastructure. Effective approaches must support legacy systems, allow restoration onto dissimilar hardware when original equipment is unavailable, and operate reliably in offline or air-gapped environments.
They also need to prioritize predictable recovery times, function across low-bandwidth networks, and avoid disrupting live production while backups are taken. Manufacturing infrastructure evolves slowly, so recovery strategies must be built to accommodate that pace rather than assuming rapid modernization.
The report’s findings suggest that many organizations have made meaningful investments in backup infrastructure. Still, fewer have validated whether those systems can reliably support recovery in real production environments. As manufacturing environments become more connected and increasingly dependent on digital systems, the ability to restore operations quickly is becoming just as important as preventing incidents.
Recovery readiness ultimately depends on more than deploying backup technology. It requires clear ownership, realistic recovery objectives, and regular testing that reflects the conditions systems will face during an actual disruption. For many organizations, the next phase of resilience will involve moving beyond backup deployment toward proving that recovery processes work when they are needed most.
Download the full Macrium 2026 Manufacturing Backup & Recovery Benchmark report here
Industrial Cyber News Desk
Industrial Cyber News Desk
