Disaster Recovery Failover Workflow Pattern: Automating Resilience Across Hybrid IT Environments

The recent AWS outage served as a stark reminder that even the most trusted cloud platforms can, and do, fail. Businesses of all sizes were affected: e-commerce sites experienced transaction failures, SaaS platforms faced extended downtime, and internal IT teams across industries scrambled to restore services for their employees and customers. For many, it wasn’t just an inconvenience; it was a costly disruption that impacted revenue, customer trust, and operational efficiency.

When critical systems go down, every second counts. The ability to respond quickly and systematically can make the difference between a temporary blip and a major crisis. Organizations with automated disaster recovery failover plans in place are able to minimize disruption by orchestrating the spin-up of infrastructure, applications, and services in real time — before end users even notice there’s a problem.

What Is Disaster Recovery Failover?

Disaster recovery failover is the process of detecting anomalies, transitioning workloads, and restoring systems when a failure occurs. In hybrid IT environments, this means coordinating recovery across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS platforms — ideally without manual intervention. 

Why Automate Disaster Recovery?

Manual recovery can be slow, error-prone, and inconsistent — especially during the chaos of an outage. Failover events are high-pressure moments when IT teams are expected to restore services immediately, all while collaborating with security teams to ensure compliance and with the business units impacted by the disruption. Each group brings its own tools, priorities, and workflows, which can create delays and confusion.

By automating disaster recovery across IT operations, security, and business units, you minimize risk and restore service faster. Aligning everyone behind a unified, automated workflow reduces handoffs, eliminates silos, and speeds up recovery. Instead of scrambling to coordinate across teams, you and your stakeholders can rely on real-time visibility, predefined policies, and automated decision points.  

With automation platforms like the Stonebranch Universal Automation Center (UAC), enterprises can:

• Detect failures through integrated observability tools
• Generate ITSM tickets automatically (e.g., ServiceNow)
• Route workflows for human or policy-based approvals across departments
• Provision infrastructure via Terraform, Ansible, and other tools
• Restore applications, reroute traffic, and run validations
• Close incidents with a full audit trail

Centralizing visibility and control through UAC ensures that every stakeholder — from infrastructure and security teams to line-of-business owners — can contribute to, monitor, and trust the recovery process.

Workflow Pattern: Disaster Recovery Failover

Disaster recovery failover isn't just a technical process; it's a mission-critical response that spans the entire enterprise. During an outage, speed and coordination are everything. UAC enables organizations to replace ad-hoc firefighting with a precise, repeatable series of orchestrated steps:

1. System anomaly detection: UAC monitors integrated tools like Dynatrace, Splunk, or Datadog and initiates automated workflows the moment anomalies are detected.
2. ITSM ticket creation: UAC initiates ITSM tickets in platforms such as ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, or PagerDuty to ensure seamless and immediate incident logging.
3. Notification and approval triggers: UAC coordinates approval routing, automatically directing incidents to the right stakeholder or executing policy-based approvals via Teams, Slack, or email.
4. Backup and data recovery: UAC integrates with backup platforms like Commvault, Veeam, or Veritas to recover and stage critical data, whether cloud-based or on-prem.
5. Infrastructure provisioning: UAC triggers infrastructure automation tools like Ansible or Terraform to spin up any required cloud resources from providers like Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud.
6. Application restoration: UAC manages the restoration of affected business applications, including Salesforce, SAP, MS-SQL, Oracle, and Temenos.
7. Validation checks: UAC executes validation scripts and security health checks through built-in capabilities or external tools like Fortinet, Palo Alto, or Trend Micro to confirm system readiness.
8. Ticket resolution: UAC completes the workflow by updating the ITSM system with resolution details, notifying relevant stakeholders, and preserving a full audit trail for compliance and reporting.

Each step of the Disaster Recovery Failover workflow pattern is modular and adaptable. Whether you're recovering a microservice, a legacy ERP system, or a multi-cloud application stack, UAC helps align recovery workflows with your infrastructure, policies, and business priorities — ensuring teams operate as one during the moments that matter most.

See how it all connects. Watch the video below for an overview of the Stonebranch Disaster Recovery Failover workflow pattern. 

Built-in Flexibility for Failovers

Disaster recovery isn’t one-size-fits-all. Every organization has its own mix of systems, stakeholders, and requirements. That’s why Stonebranch UAC is designed for flexibility, offering limitless integrations, hybrid IT compatibility, and human-in-the-loop capabilities.

Whether you’re orchestrating recovery across cloud, on-prem, or hybrid environments, UAC adapts to your needs. With UAC, you can:

• Respond in real time to minimize downtime
• Execute consistent recovery across complex infrastructure
• Ensure business continuity during critical failures
• Scale confidently, even as your IT landscape evolves

Many organizations start their automation journey with disaster recovery because the ROI is immediate. And from there, UAC becomes the foundation for broader orchestration efforts across the enterprise.

Ready to build your first workflow? Request a personalized walkthrough to see what your disaster recovery failover workflow might look like.