Large Regional Financial Institution

About the Organization

Founded more than 150 years ago, this regional financial institution serves customers across the western United States through a network of community banks. The organization supports consumer banking, commercial banking, wealth management, treasury management, and capital markets services while operating one of the largest regional banking franchises in the country. It employs approximately 10,000 people and supports millions of customer interactions through digital banking platforms, branch operations, payment systems, and critical financial applications.

Supporting those services requires a mature IT disaster recovery program. Hundreds of business applications, thousands of technology components, and numerous recovery teams must work together to restore critical systems in the right order during a disruption.

The Challenge: Recovery Planning Had Become an Exercise in Coordination

Preparing for a disaster recovery exercise required much more than selecting the applications involved. Determining what should be recovered first meant understanding the relationships between hundreds of applications, infrastructure components, and the business services they supported.

From there, the team had to identify upstream and downstream dependencies, assemble the appropriate recovery plans, convert them into executable incident procedures, and coordinate the teams responsible for recovery. Much of that work depended on experienced team members who understood how the environment fits together.

As the technology environment evolved, the process became harder to maintain. Shared infrastructure, changing dependencies, evolving recovery procedures, and multiple planning models meant every recovery scenario required careful review before work could begin.

The team faced several recurring challenges:

• Determining the optimal recovery order across interconnected applications and infrastructure.
• Understanding the dependencies that influenced recovery order.
• Coordinating the correct recovery plans, procedures, and teams for each recovery scenario.
• Building recovery incidents manually from hundreds of related records.
• Validating that recovery sequences reflected how recovery would be executed during a real event.

The information already existed within Fusion. The challenge was connecting it in a way that reflected how the team recovered.

The goal wasn’t to replace the team’s recovery process. It was to reduce the manual effort required to understand an event, identify what needed to be recovered, and prepare the team to respond.

Rethinking Recovery Planning

Rather than manually assembling every recovery scenario, the team began evaluating whether Recovery Optimization could do that work using the data they already maintained in Fusion.

Every review was measured against the same standard: did the output reflect the way the organization actually recovered?

Each recovery sequence was compared against production recovery plans. The team reviewed dependency relationships, adjusted infrastructure models, refined recovery procedures, and reran scenarios until the output reflected the way recovery occurred.

As confidence grew, the team began testing Recovery Optimization against increasingly complex recovery scenarios. In one review session, the platform generated a recovery scenario involving thousands of applications and infrastructure components in approximately five minutes, demonstrating that it could scale to the organization’s environment while preserving the recovery logic the team had spent years refining.

Recovery Optimization became more than a way to generate recovery sequences. It automatically identified supporting infrastructure, assembled the appropriate recovery plans and procedures, and generated incident records that closely mirrored the team’s existing recovery process.

One of the biggest advantages was the ability to create recovery plans around business functions without manually assembling every dependency.

Results: Building Confidence Through Operational Validation

Recovery Optimization has become an essential part of the organization’s disaster recovery process. Recovery managers no longer have to manually assemble every component of a recovery exercise before work could begin. They can start with the affected applications and allow Recovery Optimization to identify supporting infrastructure, generate recovery sequences, assemble the appropriate plans and procedures, and prepare incidents for execution.

More importantly, the organization has gained greater confidence that its recovery plans reflected operational reality instead of static documentation.

Looking Ahead: Making Recovery Readiness Continuous

The organization plans to continue expanding Recovery Optimization across additional recovery scenarios while strengthening dependency mapping and refining its recovery processes.

Recovery Optimization is expected to become part of the organization’s ongoing approach to disaster recovery, helping recovery teams spend less time preparing exercises and more time validating that recovery plans reflect the current environment.

As the organization’s data continues to improve, the team expects Recovery Optimization to provide an increasingly complete picture of how recovery will be executed during a real event.