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.
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.
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.
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.
Backups existing
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rather than a grand transformation, focus on fixes that reduce uncertainty.
If you cannot measure it, you cannot defend it when budgets tighten.
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.
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