Disaster-Recovery on GeekyRyan

Running the 2025 Annual Disaster Recovery Exercise

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

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.

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

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

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.

Developing and Documenting a Disaster Recovery Plan

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 09:00:00 +0000

DR plans usually exist in people’s heads until you actually need one - at which point tribal knowledge doesn’t cut it. Time to actually write one down.

Turn the ad hoc recovery knowledge into a structured plan: recovery point/time objectives, failover procedures, who does what during an incident. A document so someone who wasn’t in the room when the environment was built can still execute a recovery under pressure.

The plan becomes the runbook you actually use during the DR exercises, so it pays for itself immediately.