Building Resilience When Disaster Recovery Isn’t Enough

For many years, disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity plans gave leaders confidence that their organizations could recover quickly after an outage. If production systems failed, redundant infrastructure and reliable backups were there to pick up the load.

But the threat landscape has changed. Modern attackers understand how DR and continuity are built, and they now design their attacks to disable those very safeguards. If your cyber strategy still assumes backups will always be available, you may be overestimating your ability to recover when it matters most.

Cyber resilience requires a new mindset that assumes compromise, anticipates failure modes and prepares your organization to operate even when traditional DR tools are taken offline.

Today’s threat landscape

The nature of cyberattacks has shifted dramatically. In the past, many disruptions were accidental, such as a power outage, a misconfigured system or a natural disaster. Today’s attacks are deliberate, targeted and destructive.

Attackers now go beyond encrypting files or disrupting front-end applications. They aim for the very systems that organizations depend on to recover:

• Backups are being encrypted, deleted or quietly corrupted before an attack is launched.
• Identity systems such as Active Directory are targeted to lock out administrators and prevent access to recovery environments.
• Disaster recovery infrastructure is probed for weaknesses so attackers can disable it during their campaign.

You can no longer assume traditional recovery tools will protect you. Even the best-prepared organizations have seen DR plans fail because the assets they relied on were already compromised.

For leaders, the message is clear. Resilience can’t be built on the assumption that recovery tools will survive untouched. You need to plan for what happens when attackers take those away.

How attackers expose recovery failure modes

This is where failure mode analysis becomes essential. Failure modes are the specific ways in which recovery plans can break down — the hidden points of weakness that may not be obvious until a crisis hits.

Some common examples include:

• Credential failure: If Active Directory is compromised, recovery tools that rely on those credentials won’t function.
• Control plane failure: If your cloud console or hypervisor management layer is unavailable, you can’t initiate recovery.
• Data catalog failure: If the backup catalog is encrypted or destroyed, you may have petabytes of backup data but no way to identify or restore the right files.
• Documentation failure: If your recovery runbooks live inside affected systems, your team may not have access to the very guidance they need.

Attackers exploit these failure modes because they know traditional plans often overlook them. That’s why a modern business impact analysis (BIA) must do more than identify which systems are critical. It also needs to consider how those systems could fail in a cyber scenario.

By mapping these dependencies and failure points in advance, you give your organization a chance to design alternate paths to recovery. That preparation can mean the difference between a prolonged outage and a controlled return to business operations.

Where traditional DR can fall short

Traditional DR and continuity frameworks were designed for natural disasters and hardware failures, but they were never built to withstand targeted cyberattacks. They assumed that redundant sites, replicated systems and well-managed backups would be enough to restore operations.

Today, however, those assumptions break down in several ways. A targeted attack will often undermine the very systems you expect to depend on for recovery.

• Backups are compromised: Attackers infiltrate environments quietly, corrupting backups or disabling them before the primary attack begins.
• Failover systems inherit compromise: Redundant infrastructure is often managed with the same tools and credentials as production, giving attackers access to both.
• Management layers are targeted: Cloud consoles or hypervisors can be disabled, leaving teams unable to initiate recovery at all.
• Recovery windows stretch out: Even if backups survive, restoring terabytes of data can take days or weeks.

This is why resilience requires planning beyond DR. You need strategies that account for the deliberate, intelligent ways attackers target recovery itself. That includes measures such as:

• Isolated recovery environments (IREs): Secure, clean environments kept separate from production, used solely for recovery.
• Infrastructure as code (IaC): Automating recovery builds so environments can be rebuilt quickly and consistently.
• Tested recovery frameworks: Regular exercises and simulations that validate not just whether recovery is possible, but whether it can withstand cyber-specific scenarios.

These measures recognize that traditional DR may not hold up under attack. By isolating recovery, automating rebuilds and testing against cyber-specific scenarios, they give you a practical way to restore operations even when attackers target the systems you once relied on.

Moving forward with resilience

Resilient recovery planning requires moving beyond backups as your safety net. Modern cyberattacks are engineered to disable backup systems, compromise identity services and disrupt recovery environments. To keep your business protected, you need to plan for failure modes, assume compromise and design recovery capabilities that function even when your primary tools are unavailable.

Cyber resilience planning equips your organization to restore operations quickly, maintain continuity and keep innovating, even when attackers deliberately target the systems you depend on most. It is not a one-time project but an ongoing process that requires continuous testing, refinement and alignment with business priorities.

Download our white paper, Cyber Resilience in a Hybrid Cloud World, to learn how to put this process into practice and strengthen your organization’s ability to withstand modern cyberthreats.