Backups are assumed to work
Most teams discover their backups were incomplete or stale during the actual restore. Tabletop exercises surface those assumptions safely.
Disaster Recovery Tabletop Exercises
Rehearse restore sequencing, backup validation, and failover coordination before the outage forces the question.
The Problem
Common gaps in disaster recovery exercises
Restore sequencing is guesswork
Systems have dependencies that only become obvious when services come back up in the wrong order.
Failover procedures go untested
Failover runbooks rarely get exercised end-to-end because the production risk is too high. Tabletop exercises fill that gap.
Scenario Overview
What this exercise rehearses
Scenarios target specific infrastructure failures — corrupted storage, region loss, identity system outage — and walk the team through restore, validation, and cutover.
Default Roles
Default roles include infrastructure lead, application owner, database administrator, security liaison, and an executive sponsor.
What Gets Tested
Measure restore sequencing, backup validation, RTO/RPO adherence, and failover coordination.
Example Inject
A corrupted storage array takes the primary database offline. The team must restore from backups and verify data integrity before resuming operations, all while stakeholders press for status updates.
See what the report looks like
Every run produces a scored report mapped to recognized frameworks. Download the sample PDF to see the format teams get after a live Disaster Recovery exercise.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Yes. Use the Scenario Theme field to anchor the exercise to a specific platform, region, or vendor (for example, `Primary AWS region loss during quarter-close`).
Yes. Reports track declared RTOs/RPOs against the decisions the team made during the run.
Disaster Recovery focuses on IT restoration and technical sequencing; Business Continuity focuses on sustaining critical operations during disruption. Many programs run both.
Ready to run a Disaster Recovery exercise? View pricing, browse other exercise types, or try a free demo run.