Most 'DR tests' are theatre. A scientific drill produces a falsifiable result — data restored, integrity verified, time measured. We share the drill methodology we run quarterly.
What Makes a Drill Scientific
Three things separate a scientific drill from a ceremonial one. The drill produces a falsifiable result — either the workload was restored or it was not. The result is quantitative — time, integrity hash, completeness percentage. The result is independently verifiable — the auditor can reproduce the drill without our involvement.
If your last 'DR test' produced a green tick on a dashboard and no signed restoration report, you ran a ceremony, not a drill.
The Methodology We Use
- Select the workload. Rotating quarterly across Class A and Class B systems. The selection is documented at the start of the quarter.
- Declare the success criteria. Three measurable outcomes — restoration completed within target time, integrity hash matches source, application-layer functional check passes.
- Run the restore. Into an isolated environment, not production. Stopwatch starts when the engineer initiates the restore command. Stops when the application-layer check passes.
- Document. Time, hash, functional check result, exceptions, environmental observations. Signed by the engineer running the drill and a second observer.
- Report. Within five working days. Sent to the workload owner and the audit committee.
- Remediate. Any exception generates a remediation ticket with a 30-day SLA.
A drill that produces no signed report did not happen. — itSimple drill discipline rule, 2014
The Failures We See
Across hundreds of drill engagements, the same three failure modes recur:
- Vendor lock-in surfaces only during restore. Backups exist, the platform refuses to restore them outside its native environment.
- Metadata drift breaks integrity. The data restores. The application cannot open it because the index references catalog entries that no longer exist.
- Time-to-restore is 4× the slide. The vendor's RTO assumed a workload size that was correct in 2019. The current workload is six times larger.
What to Do This Quarter
Pick your most operationally critical workload. Block four hours next Thursday. Run an isolated restore. Measure the time. Note what broke. Write up a single-page report. If the report's last paragraph cannot say 'the data was restored, integrity verified, time-to-restore was N minutes', schedule the next drill — and the one after that — until it can.
The Free Audit
If you would like an itSimple senior engineer to design and observe one drill with you under NDA, our free initial audit includes that as the deliverable. Written report, five working days, no obligation.