According to Uptime Institute’s 2026 Annual Outage Analysis, 57% of organisations responding to its 2025 survey said their most recent major outage cost more than $100,000. For 20%, the cost exceeded $1 million. Those are substantial figures, particularly when you consider how dependent most businesses have become on the availability of their IT systems. On 2 November 2026, Broadcom announced that VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), previously known as VMware Live Site Recovery, is now included with eligible VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) subscriptions. For existing customers, that’s a welcome addition. It also provides a good reason to revisit their disaster recovery arrangements, particularly where recovery still depends heavily on manual procedures.
Why SRM is worth another look
Anyone who has been involved in recovering a complex IT environment will know that bringing systems back online is rarely as straightforward as restoring a few virtual machines. Applications have dependencies, services need to start in the correct order, and recovery teams need to understand what happens next. Under pressure, even a well-documented process can become difficult to follow. SRM helps address these challenges by automating recovery plans, coordinating failover and failback, and managing the sequence in which workloads are recovered. For organisations already using VCF, having access to these capabilities within their existing subscription could make it easier to improve recovery arrangements without introducing another standalone software subscription. There are several areas where I think customers should focus their attention.
1. Reducing the reliance on manual recovery
Manual recovery procedures have their place, but they introduce risks, particularly when multiple teams and interconnected systems are involved. SRM allows organisations to define recovery plans in advance and automate much of their execution. This reduces the number of manual steps required during an incident and helps ensure that recovery follows an agreed sequence. It also gives IT teams an opportunity to review application dependencies and establish which services genuinely need to be recovered first. The potential benefit is a more predictable recovery process, with less dependence on individual knowledge or decisions made during an outage.
2. Testing recovery properly
I’ve always considered regular recovery testing to be one of the most important parts of disaster recovery planning. A documented recovery plan may look perfectly reasonable, but until it’s tested, there is no reliable way of knowing whether it will meet the business’s requirements. SRM supports non-disruptive recovery testing, allowing IT teams to exercise their recovery plans without taking production workloads offline. This makes it easier to test regularly and gather evidence of recovery performance. There are a few measurements worth paying particular attention to:
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Can the organisation restore critical services within the time agreed with the business?
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO): Can the replication configuration support the business’s acceptable level of data loss?
- Recovery test results: Are recovery plans completing successfully and consistently?
- Manual intervention: How much work still needs to be performed by the recovery team?
It’s also worth remembering that recovering virtual machines doesn’t necessarily mean the application or business service is fully operational. Application-level validation should form part of the testing process. The more frequently organisations test, the better they can understand their actual recovery capabilities and identify problems before a real incident occurs.
3. Getting more from an existing VCF investment
The licensing announcement is particularly interesting for organisations already running VCF or VVF. SRM was previously licensed separately. Broadcom has now confirmed its inclusion in eligible active subscriptions, with temporary licensing available for up to 10,000 protected virtual machines while entitlement integration is completed in VCF/VVF 9.1.3. For customers who previously considered SRM but couldn’t justify the additional licensing expense, this may be a good time to reassess it. Existing SRM customers should also review their licensing arrangements to understand what the change means for future renewals. Of course, including the software doesn’t remove the need for suitable recovery infrastructure, replication, implementation or ongoing management. These still need to be planned and funded. However, removing the separate SRM subscription requirement could make a broader disaster recovery programme more commercially attractive.
4. Understanding the financial impact of recovery time
The Uptime Institute figures are a useful reminder that downtime has a measurable cost. Consider a business where an outage costs approximately $300,000 per hour. If changes to its recovery processes allow it to restore services 30 minutes sooner, the potential avoided downtime cost would be $150,000. That’s a hypothetical example rather than a claimed SRM performance improvement, but it illustrates why recovery time deserves attention. The important part is understanding the cost of downtime for individual business services, establishing realistic recovery objectives and testing whether the infrastructure can meet them. This also gives IT teams a stronger basis for discussing recovery investment with business stakeholders. Instead of relying on general concerns about availability, they can use recovery test results and estimated business impact to support their recommendations.
What should VCF customers do next?
With SRM now included in eligible subscriptions, I would encourage VCF customers to review their current disaster recovery arrangements. Start with the services that matter most to the business. Understand their dependencies, check whether existing recovery objectives are still appropriate and establish how well current processes perform against them. From there, consider where SRM could improve recovery orchestration and testing, and whether there are additional workloads that would benefit from protection. For organisations with limited internal resources, this may also be an opportunity to work with a professional services partner to assess and implement the recovery design. Ongoing testing, maintenance and operational support can then form part of an internal operating model or managed service. There’s a considerable difference between having a disaster recovery plan and knowing how your environment will behave when you need to use it. Broadcom’s decision to include SRM in VCF gives customers a useful opportunity to close that gap, particularly those who have been relying on manual recovery or have struggled to justify the additional licensing cost.
If you’re already paying for VCF, it’s worth finding out whether you’re making full use of the recovery capabilities now available to you.
Sources and references
1. Uptime Institute – Annual Outage Analysis 2026 (May 2026)
Outage cost findings from the 2025 survey. – https://intelligence.uptimeinstitute.com/index.php/resource/annual-outage-analysis-2026
2. Broadcom – Access to VMware Site Recovery Manager for Existing VCF and VVF Subscription Customers (KB 461219)
Subscription entitlement, temporary licensing and planned VCF/VVF 9.1.3 integration. – https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/461219/access-to-vmware-site-recovery-manager-f.html
3. VMware – Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication Datasheet
Recovery orchestration, failover, failback and testing capabilities. – https://www.vmware.com/docs/vmware-site-recovery-manager-datasheet
4. VMware – Site Recovery Technical Overview
Recovery planning, orchestration and non-disruptive testing. – https://www.vmware.com/docs/vmware-site-recovery-technical-overview
Financial example: $300,000 per hour × 0.5 hours = $150,000. Illustrative only.
