As organizations think about disaster recovery, the focus often falls on what happens when systems fail. But recovery outcomes are shaped much earlier, through infrastructure choices, governance, operational ownership, and the assumptions built into how systems are designed.
In his latest thought leadership article for ET’s CIO&Leader, Vinay Chhabra, Co-Founder & MD, AceCloud, examines why the decisions that determine an organization’s ability to recover are rarely made during an outage. By the time recovery is activated, many of the choices that influence its outcome have already been made.
“An outage rarely changes an organization. It simply reveals the quality of the decisions it had already made.”
Chhabra explores how decisions around infrastructure, redundancy, geographic distribution, ownership, and recovery priorities can become constraints during a crisis. He argues that recovery cannot simply be added after systems are in production. It needs to be treated as a design objective from the beginning, with recovery assumptions validated under real operating conditions.
Drawing on the lessons from the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, he highlights how organizations facing the same disruption can experience very different recovery outcomes depending on the resilience they had built beforehand. The difference, he argues, is rarely determined on the day of the outage. It reflects decisions made much earlier.
The article also outlines the questions technology and business leaders should be asking before the next disruption: whether recovery ownership is clear, whether critical services have been prioritized, whether recovery assumptions have been tested, and whether the organization has the operational maturity to execute its recovery plan under pressure.
Read More: CIO&Leader
