When Hurricane Sandy put New York datacenters underwater, David Tyler’s disaster recovery plan did its job. Roughly 1,200 database-licensed processor cores were flooded, yet business continuity largely held for the multinational financial services company where he worked at the time.

The expensive surprise came later, at the negotiating table. During talks on an upcoming enterprise licensing agreement, the database software vendor said only active, countable cores could be included.

Excluding the drowned infrastructure created potential exposure “running into tens of millions” once capacity came back online, said Tyler, who now leads Outlier Technology, a consultancy focused on improving enterprise technology systems. His background includes developing complex data and trading systems for financial firms.

“Operational resilience did not protect us from commercial exposure created by the same incident,” he added. The better protection may have been “contractual clarity over disaster-related unavailability rather than a second database stack.”

Tyler’s experience raises a question CIOs face at every renewal and architecture review: How much should you pay today to preserve a technology choice you may never need?

Second clouds, standby vendors and parallel platforms are sold as insurance. But the premiums don’t stop at the license fee.

When your users primarily worked from one or more fixed locations, you had a reasonable handle on what needed backup. The servers were yours, the devices stayed on your network, and most of the data that mattered lived on infrastructure you controlled. Hybrid work changed that maths. Now, more of the people you’re supporting may be working from home offices, coffee shops, co-working spaces, and the road. In the process, business data scattered across devices and platforms your backup strategy may not have originally included.

Much of that data landed in SaaS platforms that your company may not yet be protecting. In a survey of 500 IT decision-makers, 43% said nobody owns SaaS resilience at their business. If that sounds familiar, your data visibility gaps are probably wider than you think.

The shift started with your collaboration tools, which took on a much bigger role than anyone planned for.