Have you ever had first aid training? Have you ever been in a situation you needed to use it? Having theoretical knowledge and applying it in an emergency are very distinct disciplines when life’s on the line.
Now, the same goes for your business: disaster recovery looks straightforward, but the reality seldom is. Do you have all the information you need? Does everyone know what they’re supposed to do? Add to that fatigue and systems not behaving as expected – and stakeholders demanding answers.
In this post, we're addressing the ten most common reasons disaster recovery fails during an incident, including practical fixes you can implement without turning your organisation into a science project.
1) The Incident Starts, and Nobody Knows Who Is in Charge
When you start a project, you have a project manager. When a recovery kicks off, you you should have a disaster recovery team leader in place. In reality, chaos often ensues, with everyone helping but no concerted effort, leading to duplicated work, conflicting decisions, and missed escalations. With high uncertainty and low confidence in the early hours of an incident, leaders must be explicit who does what when.
2) Your Recovery Plan Is Too Generic to Run Under Pressure
Many policy documents disguise as plans. They describe what should happen, not how to do it, in which order, with what permissions, and under which constraints. During an incident, nobody has time to interpret prose.
3) You Tested Recovery Without the Difficult Parts
Recovery testing is often biased towards success. Table-tops are useful for coordination, but they are not proof that your backups restore, your apps start, and your team can do it quickly under pressure.
4) Backups Exist, But Backup Verification Is Weak
Backups existing 
doesn't mean they're restorable. Backup verification – essentially your early warning system – is less visible than buying a backup platform and less exciting than a big disaster recovery exercise.
5) Recovery Time Objective (RTO) And Recovery Point Objective (RPO) Are Unrealistic
Recovery targets often get set by aspiration rather than reality. If your RTO states 2 hours but your restore process takes 6 on a good day, you do in fact not have an RTO.
6) Identity And Access Breaks, So Recovery Tools Are Locked Out
Identity systems are often central points of failure but without authentication, you can’t recover. If your Single-Sign On (SSO), directory services, or privileged access tooling goes down, you can lose access to the very consoles you need to recover. Hence, you should treat identity as a tier-one dependency.
7) You Did Not Design For Ransomware, So Your Restore Path Is Compromised
Ransomware changes the game. The attacker may have had time to explore your environment, corrupt backups, steal credentials, and set traps. A “restore from last night” approach risks reintroducing the threat or restoring encrypted data right back into production. Don’t forget – it’s also your strategy to restore trust.
8) Dependencies Take You Down Rather Than the System
Your critical application may be fine, but if DNS is broken, certificates are expired, or a key SaaS integration is unreachable, your recovery will look like failure anyway. Ergo: think about the parts that hold everything together.
9) Data Restoration Is Possible, But Applications Do Not Come Back Cleanly
Even when you restore data successfully, applications can fail due to configuration drift, version mismatches, licensing issues, and forgotten secrets. This is especially common with manually built environments.
10) Communication Breaks Down, So Confidence And Speed Collapse
Efficient and effective communication is key during disaster recovery, as the technical recovery aspect is already hard enough as is. Engineers need space to work, stakeholders need truth, and customers need clarity. When communication fails, you waste time and multiply mistakes.
Rapid Triage Checklist For Live Incidents
When you are in the thick of it, the biggest risk is doing the wrong work quickly. These checks help keep you pointed at reality.
- Confirm the scenario: outage, corruption, ransomware, insider risk, cloud region failure.
- Decide containment vs restoration: do you need to isolate first to stop ongoing damage?
- Protect recovery assets: lock down backup admin accounts, vault access, and immutable storage settings.
- Restore foundational services first: identity, DNS, networking, certificate infrastructure.
- Verify restores: do not declare success until systems work at application level.
- Log decisions: a short decision log prevents circular arguments and helps post-incident learning.
A 30-Day Plan To Reduce Disaster Recovery Failures
Rather than a grand transformation, focus on fixes that reduce uncertainty.
Week 1: Strengthen Backup Verification
- Automate integrity checks and alerting.
- Prove restore success with application-level validation.
Week 2: Upgrade Recovery Testing
- Run one realistic scenario, preferably a ransomware recovery plan rehearsal.
- Measure time-to-restore and capture blockers.
Week 3: Make Runbooks Executable
- Convert the most critical services into step-by-step recovery runbooks.
- Add dependency maps and stop points.
Week 4: Build Identity Resilience And Clean-Room Capability
- Test break-glass access.
- Draft and rehearse clean-room restoration for critical systems.
Metrics That Prove You Are Getting Better
If you cannot measure it, you cannot defend it when budgets tighten.
- Restore success rate by system tier (not just backup success)
- Mean time to first clean restore
- Percentage of backups passing verification
- Time to activate the ransomware recovery plan
- Number of runbooks validated in live-like testing
Final Thought
Disaster recovery fails for predictable reasons. The good news is that predictable failures are fixable, and you can usually do so with adequate planning without the need for another tool. Focus on recovery testing that hurts a bit, backup verification that proves integrity, and a ransomware recovery plan that assumes compromise.
Why not book a disaster recovery consultation call with us?
