Recovery Drills & Validation

Why Drill?

71% of organizations do no failover testing at all (Cockroach Labs, State of Resilience 2025). A recovery plan that hasn't been tested is a guess, not a strategy. Every drill that reveals a gap is a future incident prevented.

CloudPresto runs quarterly recovery drills against your environment. Not tabletop exercises with hypothetical scenarios. Actual failover operations with measured outcomes.

Drill Types

Controlled Failover

Actual failover to the secondary region during a maintenance window. Traffic rerouted, applications validated, recovery time measured. The closest thing to a real incident without the surprise.

Backup Restore

Full restore from backup to an isolated environment. Data integrity verified, application functionality tested, restore time measured against RTO targets.

Component Failure Simulation

Targeted failure injection: kill a database node, revoke a credential, simulate a network partition. Validates that individual component failures don't cascade.

Tabletop Exercise

Scenario-based walkthrough with your team. Roles, responsibilities, communication chains, and decision points practiced without touching production. Useful for new team members and process validation.

The Drill Cycle

01

Planning 2 weeks before

Define scope, success criteria, rollback plan, and communication schedule. Stakeholders notified. Maintenance window confirmed.

02

Execution Drill day

Drill executed with real-time monitoring. Every action logged with timestamps. Recovery time measured from the moment of simulated failure to full service restoration.

03

Analysis Within 48 hours

Results documented. Gaps identified. RTO/RPO actuals compared to targets. Every deviation investigated: was it a process issue, a technical gap, or a documentation problem?

04

Hardening Following sprint

Action items from the drill are prioritized and executed. Runbooks updated. Monitoring improved. The next drill will validate that these improvements worked.

Measuring Recovery Confidence

Recovery confidence is measured drill by drill. After each drill, we score:

RTO achievement: did we hit the target recovery time?
RPO achievement: was data loss within acceptable bounds?
Automation coverage: what percentage of the recovery was automated vs. manual?
Gaps discovered: new issues found (lower = maturing, higher = new coverage areas)
Team readiness: did everyone know their role and execute it?

Recovery confidence trends over time. Your first drill will find gaps. That's the point. By the fourth drill, your team should be confident that recovery works. That confidence is earned through evidence, not assumed through documentation.