Resilience
Disaster Recovery Ladders That Protect Uptime
Plan DR in stages with clear ownership, tests, and customer communication.
By Jordan BlakePublished December 23, 20256 min read
Define the ladder
Document tiered responses: restore in-region, cross-region failover, and full secondary recovery.
Assign owners for each rung with clear handoffs and communication checkpoints.
DR is a ladder—climb only as high as the incident demands.
Test backups and DNS together
Verify backup restores with application health checks, not just checksum success.
Drill DNS, certificates, and traffic shifting so customers land on healthy endpoints.
Measure and improve
Track achieved RTO/RPO in Watch.Dog after every drill and incident.
Update runbooks and status page templates based on what slowed recovery.