3.1.3. Disaster Recovery Implementation & Testing

Having a DR plan that's never been tested is like having a fire extinguisher that's never been inspected — it might work when you need it, or it might fail spectacularly at the worst possible moment. Without regular DR testing, configuration drift silently erodes your recovery capability until the day an actual disaster reveals your backups are corrupted, your failover scripts reference resources that no longer exist, or your RTO estimate of "30 minutes" turns out to be 6 hours.

This section covers DR strategy selection (from backup/restore through active-active), recovery procedures, cross-region backup configuration, and most critically, how to test failover regularly without disrupting production. What is your organization's actual (not theoretical) recovery time?