There’s a uncomfortable truth that most business owners don’t want to face: their disaster recovery plan probably won’t work when they actually need it. Some don’t even have one. A 2025 study from Zerto found that nearly 60% of organizations that experienced a major IT disruption discovered critical gaps in their recovery strategy during the actual event. That’s not a drill. That’s the real thing, happening in real time, with revenue and reputation on the line.
For companies in regulated industries like government contracting and healthcare, the stakes climb even higher. A failed recovery doesn’t just mean lost productivity. It can mean compliance violations, contract terminations, and legal exposure that lingers for years.
Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery: They’re Not the Same Thing
People use these terms interchangeably all the time, and that confusion causes real problems. Business continuity planning (BCP) is the broader strategy. It covers how an organization keeps operating during and after a disruption, whether that’s a cyberattack, a natural disaster, a supply chain failure, or even the loss of key personnel. Disaster recovery (DR) is one piece of that puzzle, focused specifically on restoring IT systems, data, and infrastructure after an incident.
Think of it this way: business continuity asks “how do we keep the lights on?” Disaster recovery asks “how do we get the servers back up?” Both questions matter, and they need different answers.
Organizations that treat DR as their entire continuity strategy tend to overlook things like communication plans, alternate work locations, vendor dependencies, and manual workarounds for critical processes. The IT systems might come back online in four hours, but if nobody told the clients what was happening or kept billing running in the meantime, the damage is already done.
The RTO and RPO Problem
Two metrics sit at the heart of any solid disaster recovery plan: Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RTO defines how quickly systems need to be restored. RPO defines how much data loss is acceptable, measured in time. If the RPO is four hours, then backups need to run at least every four hours. If the RTO is one hour, then the infrastructure needs to support a full restoration within that window.
Here’s where it gets tricky. Many organizations set these numbers based on what sounds reasonable rather than what the business actually requires. A healthcare provider handling electronic health records can’t afford the same RPO as a company managing internal newsletters. A defense contractor processing controlled unclassified information (CUI) has regulatory obligations that dictate very specific recovery timelines.
The right approach involves working backward from business impact. Which systems generate revenue? Which ones are tied to compliance obligations? What’s the actual cost per hour of downtime for each critical application? These conversations aren’t always comfortable, but they’re necessary.
Testing Is Where Plans Go to Die
Writing a disaster recovery plan feels productive. It goes into a binder or a shared drive, and everyone moves on. But a plan that hasn’t been tested is really just a theory. And theories don’t hold up well when the ransomware hits at 2 AM on a Friday.
Regular testing reveals the gaps that documentation can’t. Maybe the backup restoration process takes three times longer than estimated. Maybe the failover site doesn’t have the right software licenses. Maybe the person who wrote the runbook left the company eight months ago and nobody updated the procedures.
Types of Testing That Actually Help
Tabletop exercises are a good starting point. Key stakeholders walk through a scenario verbally, discussing who does what and when. These are low-cost and surprisingly effective at surfacing communication breakdowns and assumption gaps.
Functional testing goes a step further by actually restoring systems from backup in an isolated environment. This validates that the technical recovery process works without putting production systems at risk. For organizations subject to HIPAA or CMMC requirements, documented functional tests often satisfy audit evidence requirements as well.
Full-scale simulation testing is the gold standard. It mimics an actual disaster as closely as possible, sometimes including physically shutting down primary systems. It’s disruptive and expensive, which is why most companies do it annually at most. But the insights it produces are invaluable.
Many IT professionals recommend testing quarterly at a minimum, with different scopes each time. A tabletop one quarter, a functional test the next, rotating through critical systems so that everything gets validated over the course of a year.
Cloud Changed the Game, But Didn’t Eliminate the Risk
There’s a persistent myth that moving to the cloud means disaster recovery is “handled.” Cloud providers do offer impressive infrastructure redundancy, but that’s not the same as a comprehensive DR strategy. Shared responsibility models mean the provider protects the infrastructure, while the customer is still responsible for data protection, access management, configuration, and application-level recovery.
A misconfigured cloud backup is just as useless as a corrupted tape drive in a closet. Organizations still need to verify that cloud-based backups are running, test restorations periodically, and ensure that their cloud architecture supports their RTO and RPO requirements.
Hybrid approaches are gaining traction for good reason. Keeping critical backups both on-premises and in the cloud provides multiple recovery paths. If the cloud provider experiences an outage (and yes, even the big ones go down), having a local copy of essential data can mean the difference between hours and days of downtime.
Compliance Adds Another Layer
For government contractors operating under DFARS and CMMC requirements, disaster recovery isn’t optional. It’s a contractual obligation. NIST SP 800-171, which forms the backbone of these frameworks, includes specific controls around system backup, recovery, and continuity of operations. Failing to demonstrate adequate DR capabilities can disqualify a contractor from bidding on Department of Defense work entirely.
Healthcare organizations face similar pressure under HIPAA. The Security Rule requires covered entities and business associates to maintain contingency plans that include data backup, disaster recovery, and emergency mode operation procedures. The Office for Civil Rights has made it clear through enforcement actions that “we had a plan but didn’t test it” is not an acceptable defense.
Organizations operating in the Long Island, New York metro area face some region-specific considerations too. Hurricane and severe storm exposure, aging power grid infrastructure in certain areas, and high real estate costs that make maintaining a secondary physical site expensive all factor into planning decisions. Many companies in the area have shifted toward geographically distributed cloud recovery sites that place backup infrastructure in different regions of the country.
Getting Started Without Getting Overwhelmed
Building a business continuity and disaster recovery program from scratch can feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to happen all at once. A practical starting point is a business impact analysis (BIA) that identifies the most critical systems and processes. From there, organizations can prioritize their recovery investments where they’ll matter most.
Small and mid-sized businesses that lack dedicated IT staff often turn to managed service providers for help with DR planning and implementation. That can be a smart move, since these providers typically bring experience from multiple client environments and can identify common pitfalls faster than an internal team encountering them for the first time.
Whatever path an organization takes, the key is to treat business continuity and disaster recovery as living programs, not one-time projects. Technology changes. Staff turns over. New threats emerge. Regulations evolve. A plan that was solid two years ago might have significant gaps today.
The companies that recover fastest from disruptions aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones that planned realistically, tested honestly, and updated consistently. That’s not glamorous work, but it’s the kind of work that keeps businesses alive when everything else goes sideways.