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SOLUTIONS
WEBINAR
The Broken Promise of DR Testing
Closing the Gap Between Your Recovery Plan and Recovery Reality
APAC/EMEA Session
Wednesday, August 19 at 11:00am CEST (UTC+2)
Organizations invest heavily in disaster recovery, then discover its weaknesses only when a real outage forces a failover. Legacy DR architectures typically fail along four fault lines: manual, script-driven recovery processes; ransomware exposure from unencrypted backup infrastructure; sprawl across disconnected point tools; and lock-in to a specific hypervisor or cloud platform.
This session examines why traditional DR testing creates a false sense of readiness and introduces an alternative built on file-system-level (rather than hypervisor-level) replication. This architecture removes hypervisor dependency and platform restrictions, enabling workload mobility across data centers, public cloud, and containerized environments as part of a continuous assessment, migration, and disaster recovery cycle.
The session also covers automated, policy-driven failover and fallback and recovery workflows for ransomware scenarios.
Why DR Testing Is Broken
Traditional DR testing is scheduled for after hours, requires complex manual scripts, and comes with the risk of overwriting production resources during the test itself. Due to these drawbacks testing often gets deprioritized or skipped entirely, and teams end up relying on hope instead of a rehearsed, repeatable process.
Infrastructure requirements compound the problem. Traditional DR testing often requires identical hardware and matching hypervisors at the recovery site, creating a hypervisor lock-in trap that makes testing rigid, expensive, and hard to scale across environments.
Even when failover is tested, fallback is usually left out. A DR test is not complete until systems have successfully returned to production, but reverse replication is frequently complex enough that teams stop after failover and never test the full cycle.
What You Will Learn
This session covers how to address each of these gaps directly: measuring actual recovery performance, testing without disrupting production, removing infrastructure lock-in from the testing process, and treating fallback as a required part of every DR test:
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Why a documented RTO/RPO is not the same as a tested recovery outcome
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How to measure Operational Recovery (the time to a confirmed, clean, usable application state) rather than relying on theoretical checkpoint metrics alone
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How to execute isolated, non-disruptive DR fire drills without touching the live production environment
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Why "Rehearsable DR" turns disaster recovery into a repeatable workflow, and what shifting to that model requires operationally
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How breaking free of hypervisor lock-in allows DR testing across physical, virtual, or cloud environments without matching 1:1 infrastructure at the recovery site
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How automated, bi-directional replication supports fallback, making full-cycle testing (of both failover and return to production) as routine as the failover test itself
Program Benefits
Attendees will leave with a framework for distinguishing theoretical RPO/RTO from confirmed Operational Recovery, a way to evaluate whether their current DR testing process is disruptive or isolated, and criteria for assessing whether a DR solution supports hypervisor-independent, full-cycle (failover and fallback) testing without additional bubble infrastructure.
Who should attend
IT and infrastructure engineers, systems architects, and DR/BC managers responsible for disaster recovery planning, testing, or execution — particularly those currently testing DR infrequently, relying on manual failover scripts, constrained by hypervisor-matched recovery infrastructure, or skipping fallback testing altogether.
Presented by
Akash Bambal
Director of Engineering
Since January 2022, Akash Bambal has served as the Director of Engineering focused on Quality Assurance and Systems Engineering at RackWare. Prior to that he spent nearly five years as the Manager of QA and Systems Engineering. Akash has over 17 years of engineering experience in enterprise class products across a variety of domains like healthcare, networking/SDN, storage, media and OS. Akash plays a critical role in pre-sales, designing migration and DR/backup solutions for customers across the JAPAC and EMEA regions for RackWare.