Most disaster recovery plans are written once, during a compliance audit, and never tested under realistic conditions. Here’s a short checklist for whether your documented RTO/RPO targets would actually survive a real regional outage.
The gap between documented and tested
A DR plan that has never been executed as a full failover test is a hypothesis, not a plan — and the majority of enterprise DR plans we review fall into exactly this category.
Common assumption failures
Backup restoration time is usually estimated from a single-table or single-VM restore test, not a full-environment restore under load — actual full-environment RTO is often 3-5x the documented target once you account for restore ordering dependencies and network throughput limits.
Cross-region replication lag is frequently underestimated for large, write-heavy databases, which quietly inflates your actual RPO well beyond what’s documented.
A pragmatic testing cadence
Quarterly tabletop exercises plus at least one full failover test per year (ideally to production-equivalent infrastructure, not a scaled-down test environment) is the minimum cadence needed to keep documented RTO/RPO numbers honest.
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