Leverage the Awareness Moment
Getting buy-in for a potentially disruptive test is half the battle. Cybersecurity Awareness Month provides the perfect air cover. The 2026 theme, "Securing the Next 250," emphasizes that preparing for the unexpected is a shared responsibility for all organizations.
Frame your test not as an IT-only drill, but as a strategic business resilience exercise. Explain to leadership that while awareness of phishing and strong passwords is good, a plan is only a theory until it's tested. An untested recovery plan often fails due to outdated documentation, unclear responsibilities, or flawed assumptions about technology. Use the national conversation this month to justify setting aside time to find and fix those failures before a real attacker does.
Define the Scope of Your Test
You don't have to simulate a full-scale apocalypse on your first try. The goal is to gain valuable insights, not to cause unnecessary downtime. Start by defining clear objectives. Are you testing your ability to recover a critical database? The response of your communications team? Your plan to failover a key application? A business impact analysis can help you prioritize which functions are most critical to test first. By narrowing the scope, you make the test manageable and the results more actionable. A successful test isn't one where everything works perfectly; it's one that yields clear lessons.
Choose the Right Type of Test
Disaster recovery tests come in several flavors, ranging from simple discussions to full-blown simulations. For many organizations, the best place to start is with a tabletop exercise. This is a discussion-based session where your incident response team talks through a realistic scenario, like a ransomware attack. A facilitator presents the scenario and asks questions to walk the team through its response, identifying gaps in communication and procedure without touching a single live system. Other options include walkthroughs, where technicians simulate recovery steps in an isolated environment, and parallel tests, where systems are recovered to a separate location while the live environment continues to run. The key is to match the test to your maturity level and resources.
Execute the Drill and Document Everything
When running the test, the process is more important than the outcome. Your goal is observation. Have a designated note-taker record every action, decision, and delay. Who was contacted? How long did it take to get access to the backups? Did the recovery instructions work as written? Were there unforeseen dependencies? These details are gold. Even in a tabletop exercise, document who is responsible for what and what information they would need to act. Real incidents are chaotic, and a major reason plans fail is that people don't know their roles or where to get information. Your test should be designed to expose these friction points in a controlled environment.
Turn a 'Failed' Test into a Stronger Plan
The most valuable part of any recovery test happens after it ends. A post-incident review, or after-action report, is where learning occurs. Gather the participants and discuss what went well, what didn't, and why. The goal isn't to assign blame but to identify the root cause of any issues. Was a backup corrupted? Were the instructions unclear? Did a key vendor fail to respond? Every gap you find is a victory—a weakness you've uncovered before a real crisis does. Assign an owner and a deadline to every corrective action. This process of testing, analyzing, and updating your plan transforms it from a static document into a living, battle-hardened strategy for resilience.
