For many years, annual disaster recovery (DR) testing has been the accepted way for organisations, particularly in regulated sectors, to demonstrate that systems and data can be recovered following a major outage or cyber incident.
Yet, despite most annual tests passing, confidence in recoverability often erodes rapidly between those exercises. The problem is not intent. It is context.
The operating environments DR testing was designed for, no longer exist.
Modern technology estates change continuously. Cloud platforms evolve weekly. Identity rules, integrations and security controls drift quietly in the background. Data protection architectures shift. External dependencies appear and disappear. Against that backdrop, a recovery test performed once a year inevitably creates a growing confidence gap.
Under both the UK operational resilience regime and DORA, firms are expected to demonstrate that they can remain within impact tolerances under severe but plausible scenarios. That expectation assumes ongoing confidence in recovery capability, not point-in-time reassurance.