The 3 a.m. test: is your recovery plan real?

Every organization has a disaster recovery document. Fewer have recovered from a real incident at 3 a.m. without discovering that the backup was corrupt, the runbook was outdated, or the person who knew the passwords left six months ago.

Resilience is proven under pressure, not assumed from procurement. Schedule quarterly recovery drills that test restore times, communication chains, and decision authority — not just whether the backup job completed.

Measure what matters: RTO and RPO for your critical systems, actual restore duration in a drill, and the gap between documented and practiced procedures.

Pair technical recovery with human readiness: phishing simulations, tabletop exercises, and clear escalation paths. Cyber resilience is a system — technology, people, and process — not a checkbox on a vendor quote.