Application-Aware Recovery Readiness Assessment for IBM Copy Services Manager

I propose adding an Application-Aware Recovery Readiness Assessment capability to IBM Copy Services Manager to help organizations determine whether their protected workloads are truly prepared for disaster recovery and operational recovery scenarios.

This enhancement would provide a structured readiness assessment for selected replication sessions or protected application workloads. Instead of focusing only on the current replication state, the assessment could evaluate relevant recovery conditions such as replication health, copy consistency, recovery-point objectives, recent recovery activity, required replication relationships, and the completion of defined recovery validation steps.

The proposed capability could allow administrators to define application or workload-specific recovery requirements and associate them with the relevant CSM sessions and volume groups. CSM could then provide a readiness score or status indicating whether the defined recovery requirements are satisfied, along with clear reasons for any readiness gaps.

For example, if replication is healthy but a required recovery validation step has not been completed recently, CSM could identify the workload as requiring attention rather than presenting replication health alone as an indication of overall recovery readiness.

The assessment could evaluate relevant recovery conditions such as replication health, copy consistency, recovery-point objectives, recent recovery activity, required replication relationships and recovery dependencies, and the completion of defined recovery validation steps.

This enhancement would help enterprises:

• Gain a clearer view of application recovery readiness.

• Identify recovery gaps before they become operational problems.

• Connect replication health with broader recovery requirements.

• Support more consistent disaster-recovery validation practices.

• Improve visibility into recovery preparedness across critical workloads.

• Provide actionable explanations for recovery-readiness gaps.

• Strengthen business continuity and operational resilience.

By adding application-aware recovery readiness to IBM Copy Services Manager, IBM could extend CSM beyond managing replication operations toward helping organizations understand whether their critical workloads are actually prepared for recovery. This could provide greater confidence in disaster-recovery planning while complementing CSM's existing replication, automation, high-availability, and cyber-resilience capabilities.