Running an Annual Disaster Recovery Exercise for a Compliance-Driven Customer

Regulated customers (financial services, etc.) need documented proof that disaster recovery actually works, not just exists on paper. Annual DR exercise to satisfy that requirement.

Copy representative data to an isolated recovery environment, failover to the DR site, smoke test critical functionality. Coordinating with the customer on what data’s usable and hitting their testing window is as much the project as the technical failover.

Running it annually instead of only when disaster strikes is what makes the DR plan credible instead of theoretical.