Most disaster recovery plans fail not because they were badly designed, but because they were never tested under real conditions.
Here's the pattern I see repeatedly: a team writes a DR plan, files it somewhere, and moves on. Months or years later, an incident hits. People open the document and find that three of the steps reference infrastructure that no longer exists, the contact list has two people who left the company, and the estimated recovery time was based on a database size from two years ago.
The plan looked complete when it was written. It just wasn't maintained.
The testing gap
There's a meaningful difference between a DR plan and a tested DR capability. The first is a document. The second is evidence that recovery actually works.
Most teams have the document. Very few have run a proper failover drill in the last six months. And almost none have done one under conditions that resemble an actual incident — time pressure, incomplete information, people who haven't practiced the steps before.
This matters because recovery is a skill, not just a procedure. The runbook might be accurate, but if nobody on the team has executed it before, the first time they do it will be slower and more error-prone than it needs to be.
What actually breaks
When I work with teams on DR assessments, the gaps that consistently come up are:
Documentation drift. Infrastructure changes faster than runbooks do. Steps that were accurate six months ago may reference resources that have been renamed, moved, or deleted.
Unclear decision authority. When an incident happens at 2am, who decides to fail over? Who has the access? Who communicates with customers? If the answers aren't documented and practiced, you'll lose time figuring it out in the moment.
Untested dependencies. A database failover might work perfectly in isolation, but does your application actually reconnect cleanly? Does the cache get flushed? Are there jobs that need to be restarted manually?
RTO assumptions. Recovery time objectives are often set in planning meetings based on gut feel or contractual requirements. They're rarely validated against how long recovery actually takes.
The fix isn't complicated
You don't need chaos engineering and a dedicated DR team to improve your resilience posture. The basics matter more:
- Run a tabletop exercise. Walk through a failure scenario with the team, step by step, and note where the gaps are.
- Pick one recovery procedure and do it. Not in production, but do it end to end and time it.
- Review your runbooks quarterly. Set a calendar reminder. It takes an hour.
- Make sure at least two people know how to execute each critical procedure.
The goal isn't a perfect DR plan. It's a plan you can actually trust.
If any of this sounds familiar, get in touch — happy to talk through where to start.