Running the 2025 Annual Disaster Recovery Exercise

Annual DR exercise for a customer with strict compliance requirements (SOC 2). Copy representative data to an isolated environment, failover to the DR site, run a full smoke test against the failed-over setup.

Running this for the second year in a row meant comparing against last time - what was slower than expected, what documentation was wrong, where the runbook needed updates. If each iteration of an annual DR exercise doesn’t make you faster and more confident, it’s just checking a compliance box, not actually improving your recovery posture.